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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No., ._ 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE PERSONAL EQUATION 



HARRY THURSTON PECK 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 







Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. 

^11 ri,^hts reserved. 



TO 

GEORGE WILLIAM SHELDON, Litt.D, 

IN MEMORY OF 

SOME VERY PLEASANT HOURS 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 

William Dean Howells 3 

Marcel Prevost 53 

George Moore 89 

The Evolution of a Mystic 135 

The Passing of Nordau 157 

The Migration of Popular Songs ... 173 

The New Child and its Picture-books . 193 

American Feeling towards England . . 213 

President Cleveland 233 

Some Notes on Political Oratory , . . 267 
The Downward Drift in American Edu- 
cation 327 

Quod Minime Reris. 359 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

Mr. Howells has essayed so many kinds 
of literary work, and has won so much de- 
served distinction in them all, as to make it 
very difficult to know from just what point of 
view one should regard him in considering his 
writings as a whole. It is, of course, primarily 
as a novelist that the popular mind will always 
think of him ; yet when we come to analyze 
the meaning of his work, and seek to grasp the 
underlying motive of it all, it will be quite ap- 
parent to the analyst that fiction is but one 
particular expression of a spirit that pervades 
his other literary work as well ; and that the 
novel is, at most, only one medium of several 
by which he has endeavored to effect a given 
purpose. A broad survey of all his writings 
will, I think, reveal that purpose in making 
clear the fact that it is really as a critic that we 
ought to view him, and in giving us the critic's 
motive as the fundamental basis for a final 
judgment of his place in literature. 



4 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

It is not, however, merely as a literary critic 
that he most demands attention. One finds it 
quite impossible to narrow a consideration of 
his genius in such a way as this. Mr. Howells, 
to be sure, as well as others, is a critic of litera- 
ture, and he is a very searching and suggestive 
critic, too ; but one cannot even touch upon 
his literary criticism without feeling that in 
reality it is but a part, and a comparatively 
unimportant part, of his wider criticism of life ; 
and that the same is true of every other phase 
of his intellectual activity when regarded sep- 
arately and alone. This can, indeed, be said 
more broadly of Mr. Howells than of any other 
English-speaking author. Mr. Henry James, 
no doubt, is also in a way a critic of life ; but 
his little corner of observation is so very little, 
his lenses are so carefully adjusted to one par- 
ticular focus, and his instrument is so obvious- 
ly an opera-glass and not a telescope, as to 
make his books the impressions of a first-night- 
er rather than the accurate and cosmic view 
of a sociological astronomer. Mr. Howells, on 
the other hand, has swept the whole horizon 
of his time ; and it is not, therefore, merely as 
an essayist or as a novelist or as a poet that 
we must consider him, but as one who in his 
criticism and his fiction and his poetry alike 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 5 

has set before himself the task of picturing the 
life of his own age and of analyzing its spirit 
and its tendencies. 

It is, of course, in fiction that his work has 
been most fully carried out ; and, therefore, 
chiefly from his fiction one obtains the truest 
insight into all his intellectual processes, and 
the best examples also of his critical felicities 
and his fundamental limitations. The circum- 
stance that fiction is his chosen field of effort 
gives the subject a peculiar interest, because 
it involves a glance at the question of the 
American Novel — the question whether there 
has yet been written, or whether there is ever 
to be written, a kind of fiction that Americans 
shall recognize as essentially national, not only 
in its theme and color, but in its external form 
and literary technique. 

Now, as to the American Novel when re- 
garded from one point of view, one cannot 
help agreeing on the whole with Mr. Rollo 
Ogden's witty and, in the main, most sensi- 
ble contentions. It is, indeed, absurd to sup- 
pose that, after all the centuries of creation 
and experiment which lie between Parthenius 
and Rudyard Kipling, we are going to witness 
the evolution of some new and striking literary 
manner, some principle of constructive art that 



6 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

no one has hitherto perceived, some tremen- 
dous cpocJieniacliend discovery that shall do for 
fiction what steam and electricity have done 
for mechanics, and that shall subtly harmonize 
with the material bigness and boisterousness 
of our native land. This vaguely fascinating 
dream has not, however, been altogether val- 
ueless. It has given the young brood of mag- 
azine-writers a theme of perennial interest, 
over which they can moult their literary pin- 
feathers at twenty dollars a page, and it has 
provided the American public with a pleasant 
if evanescent sensation perhaps once in every 
six months ; for at intervals of just about this 
length the joyous announcement has gone 
forth that now at last the American Novel has 
been written ; and then the literary tom-toms 
have been violently beaten, and every one in 
the Literary Shop has whooped it up so long 
as people could be induced to listen to the 
row, and until they have gone back again to 
the reading of English novels that are not 
constructed on a scientific theory or from pa- 
triotic motives, but are simply good, strong 
specimens of writing that grip the reader's at- 
tention, and make him willing and even eager 
to part with his money for more of the same 
sort. 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 7 

Therefore, in this sense of the word, one 
need not be looking for an American novel as 
distinct from an English or a French or a 
Scandinavian or an Italian or a Graeco-Roman 
novel. It may be assumed that the resources 
of fiction-writing are just as thoroughly well 
known as they ever will be ; that all the ap- 
pliances of the art have been discovered and 
tested long ago ; that no amount of taking 
thought wuU add a single item to the technical 
equipment which is at the service of every 
novelist to-day ; and that whenever a really 
great novel is produced, it is great because of 
the man behind the book, and not because of 
any fine-spun theory which the book itself ex- 
emplifies, A heaven-born artist does not spend 
the best years of his life in hunting up new col- 
ors for his palette. It is only a servant-maid 
who makes a poor pen an excuse for her bad 
spelling. And so in fiction - writing, if the 
vivida vis inflame the writer, it doesn't make 
the slightest difi'erence whether he is an Ideal- 
ist or a Romanticist or a Realist or a Natural- 
ist or a Symbolist or a Sensltivist or a happy 
combination of all six. If he have it in him 
to write an immortal novel he will write it, and 
that is all there is to it. 

Nevertheless, from another point of view, 



8 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

one may truly speak of the American Novel 
as a thing apart, because of the great difficulty 
in the conditions that attend its successful 
composition. The American Novel, as we un- 
derstand it, is not to be a novel constructed 
on hitherto unheard-of lines, or by some new 
formula thoughtfully evolved by American 
writers ; but a novel that shall give an ade- 
quate and accurate delineation of the life that 
is lived only in this huge, loose-hung, colossus 
of a country — a kind of life to which the his- 
tory of the world affords no parallel whatever. 
When the Englishman or when the French- 
man sits down to write a novel, he has no djf- 
ficulty in getting his social mise en scene to suit 
him ; he need not, indeed, give it any particu- 
lar thought at all. The social system that he 
knows is one whose framework is definite, well 
ordered, compact, and perfectly intelligible 
even to the casual foreigner. Everything has 
its place ; everything is regulated and under- 
stood ; everything, in fact, is obvious and ex- 
plicable. His background is, in a way, already 
filled in, and it is only figure-painting that he 
has to do. 

But how strangely different is the case with 
one who seeks to fix upon his canvas a true 
impression of American life ! A vast kaleido- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 9 

scopic mass of color lies before him, shifting 
and changing with every touch, a society in a 
fluid state, heterogeneous, anomalous, bizarre, 
and shot all through with a million piquant 
incongruities. The boundless wealth and the 
squalid poverty, the splendor and the crudity, 
the magnificence and the cheapness, the reck- 
lessness and the conservatism, the cynicism 
and the faith, the intellectual keenness and 
the unspeakable fatuity, the strong common- 
sense and the foolish gullibility, the defiant 
arrogance and the patient meekness, the com- 
mercial acuteness and the political stupidity — 
can any one bring out all these wonderful con- 
trasts in the national character, and yet pre- 
serve the slightest trace of verisimilitude and 
probability? And the strange medley of hu- 
manity — the washer- woman of the diggings 
blossoming out into the grandc dame who en- 
tertains kings and gives her daughters in mar- 
riage to princes, the young girl with her 
" chaste depravity," the emancipated woman, 
the canal-boy fighting his way to the headship 
of the nation, the keen-eyed business man who 
is to-day cornering the market and to-morrow 
haranguing the Senate and the day after bring- 
ing out an edition of a classic, the curious bits 
of foreign life and custom embedded in the 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



midst of an Anglo-Saxon people, and under- 
neath it all a great compact mass of strong 
and simple and conservative men and women, 
bearing up the rest and giving cohesion and 
stability to the whole structure. Any one can 
tell of all these things ; any one can sketch 
them separately and in detail ; but who is able 
and who will ever be able to give one luminous 
picture of them as a single entity, each in its 
true relation to the rest, with a sense of pro- 
portion and relativity, and in such a way as to 
make one see and feel the truth of it all ? 

No such problem ever before confronted the 
novelist ; yet it is not until this problem has 
been solved that the American Novel in its 
largest sense will have an actual existence. To 
begin with, there is not even such a thing as 
an American type. There is a New England 
type, and there is a Southern type, and there 
is a Far Western type ; but even these are 
not perfectly defined, but shade off into each 
other with many an imperceptible nuance, while 
between them lie all sorts of individual and 
quite distinctive groups which an American 
easily recognizes, even though he cannot so 
easily describe them. In no country in the 
world are there so many local points of differ- 
ence ; for not only are a Bostonian and a New- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS II 

Yorker and a Philadelphian and a Chicagoan 
and a San Franciscan essentially unlike, but 
there are distinctions quite as clearly though 
more subtly to be drawn between a Buffa- 
lonian and a Syracusan, between a Baltimorean 
and a Charlestonian, between a Peorian and a 
Topekan. These people do not even speak 
an absolutely identical language, but display 
such dialectic variations as make the differ- 
ence of habitat immediately perceptible to the 
ear of a native. It is only the self-satisfied 
Englishman who ignores all these bewildering 
complications. He, of course, with the smug 
complacency of his kind, will talk with half a 
dozen Americans, read a few American news- 
papers, and then introduce into his next novel 
a " Yankee heiress " or a " Senator from Mi- 
kewa " with characteristics evolved from the 
writer's inner consciousness, and speaking a 
dialect the like of which was never heard from 
the mouth of any human being, but which is 
far more grotesque than if an American nov- 
elist should represent an Englishman speak- 
ing a blend of Cockney jargon, Dublin Irish, 
Yorkshire dialect, Welsh patois, and Lowland 
Scotch. 

Yet though foreigners do not understand 
the complicated difficulties that beset the 



12 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

one who tries to limn in a large way the life 
and attributes of the American people, our 
own writers are fully aware of them ; and 
hence it is that they have given us, in the 
main, not the American Novel, but novels 
written in America, which is a very different 
thing. It is not likely that any better work 
will be done than much of that which already 
reveals some of the strange nooks and corners 
of American life. No one, for example, could 
show a subtler knowledge of New England 
than Miss Wilkins brings to her intensely 
vital delineations ; no one will ever make us 
feel more intensely the spirit of the North- 
west than Mr. Hamlin Garland does ; no one 
will better draw the dull, raw life of the little 
towns of Central and Western New York than 
Mr. Harold Frederic ; no one will have a fuller 
understanding of certain phases of existence in 
the American metropolis than has Mr. Brander 
Matthews. But who is to come forth equip- 
ped with the knowledge and the insight and 
the vivid power necessary to draw the picture 
as a whole, and with a master's touch to fling 
before us the great national cosmos in its en- 
tirety — vital, convincing, real ? 

But, says some one, there is Mr. Howells ; 
and sure enourrh, if we errant that Mr. Howells 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 13 

has not succeeded in this task, then so far no 
one has succeeded. Indeed, we might say a 
priori that Mr. Howells is the one living 
writer who by the circumstances of training, 
experience, and exceptional gifts ought to 
grapple successfully with the difficulties that 
have proved insurmountable to so many others. 
Born in one of the Central Western States at 
a time when these were still in the making, 
his most impressionable years were spent amid 
influences that gave him at first hand an inti- 
mate knowledge of American life in its evo- 
lutionary stage. In an intensely American 
community, among those who typified all the 
primitive American virtues of courage, indus- 
try, integrity, and thrift, he looked upon the 
nation-builders as they did their work, and 
drank in the subtlest understanding of that 
stratum of society which is the base of the 
whole gigantic system. And for his purpose 
it was lucky that he never had the academic 
training, which, though it sharpens the critical 
powers, too often narrows the sympathies and 
deadens the creative faculty. He lived his 
early years as one of the people, as a printer, 
as a newspaper reporter, recording continually 
his impressions, learning the art of writing in 
a school that teaches clearness, vividness, and 



14 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

compression, and being all the time in touch 
with the multifarious types that daily flit be- 
fore the keen eye of the American journalist. 
In i860, with his appointment by President 
Lincoln as Consul to Venice, began the other 
side of his preliminary training. From the 
raw and unformed civilization of the West he 
passed at once to an environment that was 
absolutely antithetical, to an atmosphere per- 
meated with memories of old-time magnif- 
icence and eloquent of art — an atmosphere in- 
stinct with sensuous beauty, in which all sorts 
of exquisite half-tints become perceptible, and 
in which the mind awakens to subtle mean- 
ings and delicate discriminations. This curious 
change from Columbus to the Canalazzo, from 
the Muskingum to Malamocco, was of all 
things the most ideal as a phase in the train- 
ing of the literary artist. It gave to him a 
wholly different point of view, a new standard 
of comparison, a sense of values and of pro- 
portion, and enabled him to see more clearly 
and with a truer perspective the other life that 
he had left behind him. Returning to the 
United States, his experience was enlarged in 
still different surroundings when he took the 
editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and for 
many years made one of the set which in those 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1 5 

days stood for all that was refined and culti- 
vated in American letters. The circle of his 
experience was completed when he passed 
from Boston to New York and made his home 
in the cosmopolitan whirl of the American 
metropolis. 

An experience and a training such as these, 
the like of which are rare indeed, could scarce- 
ly fail to give to their possessor a marvellous 
power, if coupled with the requisite natural 
gifts. And Mr. Howells has these gifts. A 
quick eye for what is striking in individuals 
or in life, a wonderful photographic instinct for 
detail, a shrewd insight into human motive, a 
truly American perception of the ludicrous, a 
natural gift of language, a talent for crystalliz- 
ing in a phrase or an epithet the essential at- 
tribute of any subject, a Frenchman's rever- 
ence for le mot juste — all these superimposed 
upon an experience so broad as to be national 
rather than sectional, and with the advantage 
of an international point of view, may surely 
warrant one in saying what has just been said : 
that if Mr. Howells has not written the Ameri- 
can Novel, then no one else as yet has written 
it. And, indeed, whether he has written it or 
not, he has at any rate received a reward com- 
mensurate with his native gifts and his excep- 



l6 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

tional endowment. He is to-day the most em- 
inent of all living American men of letters. 
As a novelist he is one of the greatest that our 
country has yet produced. A new book from 
his pen is always regarded as an important 
literary event. His name is known and hon- 
ored wherever the English language is under- 
stood. But has he, as a matter of fact, suc- 
ceeded at any time in writing the American 
Novel and not merely clever novels of Ameri- 
can life written in America by an American ? 

It may, perhaps, at first sight seem fanciful, 
but there can really be little doubt that the 
limitations which have prevented Mr, Howells 
from attaining supreme success as a fiction- 
writer, and that have made his general theory 
of criticism and of life inadequate, are to be 
traced directly to certain circumstances which 
have already been narrated. The first is his 
long residence in Boston, and the second is 
his subsequent identification with New York. 
Naturally, a thesis such as this requires some 
specific elucidation and defence. 

One of these days a work will, perhaps, be 
written upon the topograpical aspects of liter- 
ature, and in it at least one long chapter will 
have to be devoted to the influence of Boston 
upon American letters. Everybody knows 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



17 



what Boston is — one of the most interesting, 
and perhaps the most absolutely individual, of 
American cities. It has a distinctive character 
and a distinctive flavor that no one has ever 
failed to recognize. The character is decided- 
ly pronounced, and the flavor is a little tart, 
with something of what the Boston dialect 
would describe as a "tang"; but both are 
wholesome, and, in a way, agreeable. Boston 
shows us, in fact, almost the sole survival upon 
American soil of a purely English influence — 
an influence seen alike in the city's external 
appearance, in the temperament of its people, 
and in their intellectual characteristics. Yet 
this strong suggestion of England never recalls 
semi-cosmopolitan London with its multitudi- 
nous interests and its consciousness of contact 
with the whole wide world. It is rather a sug- 
gestion of Leicester mingled with Leeds and 
perhaps a dash of Edinburgh — in fact, of a 
community not directly in touch with anything 
beyond its own borders, but very self-centred 
and compact, and taken up wholly with its 
own concerns. Its colonialism stands out all 
over it with both the virtues and the defects 
of its quality. There are all the integrity 
of purpose, all the anxious uneasiness about 
" duty," the intense self-respect and self-reli- 



l8 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

ance of the New-Englander, the love of truth 
and justice, the independence and the recti- 
tude ; but there can be found also all the in- 
tolerance, all the narrowness, all the impene- 
trable complacency, and all the intellectual 
myopia of the provincial Englishman. 

Charles Reade, in one of his novels, gives a 
series of maps to illustrate the point of view 
of the average English squire. His own coun- 
ty is first depicted in a large, clear map, with 
its smallest localities carefully noted ; a second 
map shows England as a whole, about half as 
large ; then in a third map, drawn very small, 
is displayed the rest of the world covering a 
space of about the size of one's thumb-nail. 
Now this is precisely the way in which a true 
Bostonian would set forth respectively the 
town of Boston, the United States as a whole, 
and the rest of the world, if he were to ex- 
press his real feelings in terms of comparative 
cartography ; and it simply means that Bos- 
ton's true afifinities are not at all with the great 
cities of the earth, but with the provincial Eng- 
lish towns. It has their atmosphere to perfec- 
tion ; so that although we know, as a matter 
of fact, that its customs are in reality those of 
the civilized world at large, one never meets a 
Boston man without a certain vague, yet irre- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1 9 

pressible feeling that he probably dines at five 
o'clock in the afternoon, and has a sweet cham- 
pagne served with the fish. 

The truest expression of the Boston spirit 
in literature is undyingly preserved in the work 
of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose claim to im- 
mortality is to be found above all in this, that 
he is the quintessence of Boston, which is in 
itself the quintessence of New England ; and 
both his foreign travel and his belief in his 
own cosmopolitanism only serve to give a more 
striking background to his intense provincial- 
ism, and to enhance its piquant flavor. In his 
verse we find much less to make us think of 
Hippocrene than of the "kag" of cider. The 
poetic draught substitutes for the sparkle of 
the vintage of Champagne the nip of the gin- 
ger that gives life to the home-brewed switchel. 
It is not the poet of tradition who in Holmes 
appears to be singing to us, but more often 
the village bard, whose verses appear with 
beautiful regularity in the left-hand upper cor- 
ner of the county newspaper, and who has his 
neat little copy of rhymes for every celebra- 
tion, from the dinner of the village fire-com- 
pany to the opening of the ladies' oyster-sup- 
per for the benefit of the Orthodox Church. 
In like manner, when we read certain passages 



20 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

of the Autocrat, we can shut our eyes and pass 
behind the ostensible personality of the au- 
thor to his real prototype — the country smarty 
whose reputation as a funny fellow draws a 
group of admiring rustics about him as he sits 
on a cracker-barrel in the village " store " and 
emits his jokes, pausing only to refresh him- 
self from a contiguous cheese, and to spit pro- 
fusely upon the cast-iron stove. It may be 
frankly conceded that the wit is genuine, 
though suggesting Italian vinegar rather than 
Attic salt ; but it is intensely local, and its 
similes and metaphors all smack of the cider- 
mill, the quilting-bee, the town-meeting, and 
the " vendue." 

The influence of long contact with a com- 
munity whose spirit is such as this must neces- 
sarily stimulate self-consciousness and an in- 
trospection that may easily become morbid in 
its intensity. Yet its effects might well be salu- 
tary to one whose own temperament lacked re- 
pression and subjectivity. Unfortunately, Mr. 
Howells already possessed these qualities in 
excess. Just as the late Edward Henry Palmer, 
though born of English parents and in an Eng- 
lish home, was, from the moment of his birth, 
in every essential respect an Arab, so Mr. 
Howells, though a native of Ohio, and sprung 



WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS 21 

from Welsh stock, has always been essentially 
a New-Englander. The remarkable self-analy- 
sis of his early mentality which he has given 
us in A Boys Tozvii proves this beyond a doubt. 
It shows him even as a child to have been 
self-conscious, introspective, abnormally prone 
to dwell upon his own sensations and emo- 
tions, and to exaggerate them out of all pro- 
portion to their real importance. This is the 
true New England temperament, rooted in in- 
dividualism, pushing self-analysis to the point 
of torture, regarding details as of infinite sig- 
nificance, teaching that the part is greater than 
the whole, and robbing its possessor of a sense 
of true proportion. But to the literary artist, 
as to the philosopher, the sense of proportion 
is everything ; for it is the one sovereign anti- 
dote to provincialism, philistinism, and mor- 
bidity. It and a sense of humor are God's 
greatest gifts to man ; and the first of these 
He seems in His infinite wisdom to have de- 
nied to the typical New-Englander, who, in 
politics and religion and literature alike, out- 
does Protagoras in devotion to the doctrine 
that the individual is the measure of all things. 
That Mr. Howells, with New England traits 
already so sharply accentuated, should have 
been definitely and irrevocably stamped with 



22 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

the New England influence, must therefore be 
regarded as a distinct misfortune to American 
literature ; for it has narrowed his marvellous 
gifts of delineation to a single sphere and made 
him the novelist of a section, when his genius 
might otherwise have become broadly nation- 
al. This consideration fully answers the ques- 
tion whether he has written the American 
Novel, for it shows that he has not ; that fate 
had determined that he should merely write 
the Novel of New England. This, indeed, he 
has actually done. He has given us a single 
novel that is really great, another that is near- 
ly great, and one absolutely perfect story ; and 
each of these is New England to the core. 

In A Modern Instance one sees what he 
might have achieved but for the overmaster- 
ing influence that has fettered and restricted 
his gifts of portraiture. This book differs es- 
sentially from the general run of American 
novels in its breadth and grasp and color, and 
especially in being free from a certain thinness 
that characterizes pretty nearly all the fiction 
produced in the United States. American 
novels almost invariably lack body and sub- 
stance. They have a high, dry, rarefied atmos- 
phere which may be very clear, but in which 
it is very difficult to breathe for any length 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 23 

of time. They may possess more subtlety than 
one finds in an English novel, but they are 
afflicted with so advanced an anaemia that one 
always turns from them with a sense of relief 
to the strong, well-nourished work of the Eng- 
lishman who shows us bone and muscle and 
flesh and blood in place of mere nerves, with 
plenty of good port -wine and roast beef in- 
stead of angel-food and ether. But A Modern 
Instance has body to it, and color and move- 
ment and vitality. Nearly all of its characters 
are living, human beings, and not mere psycho- 
logical studies. It is for this reason that one 
can read and re-read the book, and find several 
of its personages dwelling forever after in his 
memory, as do the men and women whom we 
have known in life. Bartley Hubbard, for ex- 
ample, is as real as Mr. Howells himself ; and 
the proof of it is found in the fact that, in 
spite of his baseness and cheapness, we cannot 
refrain from feeling sorry for him and even at 
times from almost liking him, just as we feel 
sorry for him and almost like him when we 
meet him in our daily life. And Marcia and 
Kinney and Witherby and the old Squire are 
living beings, too. Mr. Howells has drawn 
them with more freedom and boldness than 
he often shows, and has given himself far less 



24 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

concern about accumulating mere details. He 
has, moreover, in a measure cut loose from his 
own pet theory of fiction-writing. He has not 
scrupled to give us some fine dramatic touches 
after the manner of the Romanticists, and has 
even led us up to an intensely powerful climax 
in the scene where the quaintly pathetic figure 
of Squire Gaylord rises in the Western court- 
room and pleads for justice and for vengeance 
in the last words that he ever utters. And 
this is one of the things that make for genuine 
realism, because such striking scenes as these 
are not so rare in life as Mr. Howells some- 
times appears to think. Altogether, one can- 
not say too much of A Modern Instance. It 
bears the true stamp of genius, and it will live 
as long as anything that American literature 
can show ; for in it the writer stands aside and 
lets the action evolve itself before the reader's 
eye, and thus comes very near to meriting the 
tribute which Hawthorne gave to the Cyclo- 
pean art of Anthony Trollope when he said 
that in reading him it seems as though some 
giant had hewn out a great lump of English 
soil and set it down before us, with all the hu- 
man beings on it going about their affairs un- 
conscious of our observation. And this is just 
what Mr. Howells has done in A Modern In- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 25 

stance, only it is out of the soil of New Eng- 
land that he has hewn the lump. 

TJie Rise of Silas Lapham is, as a whole, be- 
low the level of A Modern Instance, but it is 
still a masterly and memorable book. The 
character of Silas Lapham himself is by all odds 
the most remarkable piece of portraiture that 
Mr. Howells has ever done, and it is the only 
one that attains to the proportions of a broadly 
national type. The self-made man who works 
his way up the ladder of material prosperity 
was never more convincingly depicted ; and 
the portrait is one that is true of the native 
American everywhere, East as well as West. 
Rooted in the soil of the farm, this homely 
figure with its heaviness and gentleness, its 
simplicity and shrewdness, its rugged honesty 
and worldly wisdom, its uncouthness and na- 
tive humor, its quaint conceit and innocent 
pride tempered always with a hesitating self- 
depreciation, its eye to the main chance, and 
its haunting and remorseless conscientiousness 
— we see them all in this amusing yet pro- 
foundly touching creation, which is as vital as 
anything that human art has ever limned. The 
opening chapter where Lapham is interviewed 
by Bartley Hubbard for the Events, in the 
office of the "mineral-paint" manufactory, is 



26 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

a miracle of condensed pictorial power, in 
which each word goes with swiftness and pre- 
cision to the mark. When we have finished 
it, we know the Colonel through and through 
in every stage of his career, and if the book 
had ended there, it would still have given to 
our native fiction a new and permanent pos- 
session. 

In TJie Lady of the Aroostook we have the 
most perfect story that American literature 
has yet produced. It is the height of literary 
art, for its finish is as exquisite as its design. 
One can re-read it a score of times, and always 
with a fresh enjoyment of its unerring insight 
and convincing truth, and of the delicate hu- 
mor that plays along its lines and heightens 
here and there the scenes of really unstudied 
emotion that are elsewhere so infrequent in 
our author's work. But the book is more than 
a perfect story ; it is a concrete illustration of 
a phase of American civilization, and one that 
could not be half so well explained in any 
other way. It depicts social conditions that to 
a foreigner are quite inexplicable, yet which an 
American understands so thoroughly that if he 
had not learned to know the foreign point of 
view, as Mr. Howells came to know it, it never 
would occur to him to set it forth in the form 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 27 

of a story. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner has 
made a very admirable use of some of the Eng- 
lish criticism upon this book in showing how 
certain of the conditions of American life dif- 
fer toto ccslo from anything that a European 
can understand. That Lydia Blood, a girl 
from rural New England, and reared amid sur- 
roundings that are homely in the extreme, 
should have all the delicacy and dignity of a 
" lady," and that she should be considered by 
the writer and by the personages of the story 
to be a " lady," was as strange and improbable 
to the foreign critic as that on reaching Venice 
she should at once have taken with entire com- 
posure a lady's place in its society. 

One dwells with fondness on this charming 
story, which compresses within a hundred pages 
so much rare portraiture, so much sympathet- 
ic knowledge, and so many delicate literary 
graces. With the possible exception of Stan- 
iford, every single character in the book is 
drawn to perfection, from Ezra Perkins, who 
drives the Concord stage at South Bradfield, 
and Aunt Maria and Captain Jenness, to the 
curiously cosmopolitan circle of Mrs. Erwin's 
set at Venice — Miss Landini, who invokes im- 
partially the devil and the Deity in her con- 
versation, Rose - Black, the crawling English 



28 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

artist, Henshavv Erwin with his passion for 
collecting Americanisms, and Lydia herself, a 
second Marcia Hubbard, but with finer traits. 
Every one of these is sketched in with a firm 
hand and the most artistic sense of con- 
trast ; and the changes of scene from South 
Bradfield to the ship, and from the ship to 
Venice, give a fascinating and varied back- 
ground for the movement of the story. The 
last three or four pages would alone be sufifi- 
cient to make a lasting reputation for their 
author, so perfect is the finish of the picture 
where Staniford, after marrying Lydia, goes 
with her to visit her old home at South Brad- 
field in the midst of winter. Mr. Howells has 
caught the exact feeling of the scene, the peo- 
ple, and the atmosphere, and each successive 
stroke so artfully heightens the effect that in 
reading one almost cries out with wonder and 
delight. The prim house walled in by snow- 
banks, the social evening with the minister and 
his wife, which Aunt Maria, after passing coffee 
and sponge-cake, felt to be so brilliant as to 
be almost wicked, and, above all, the symbolis- 
tic parlor-lamp of pea-green glass with a large 
red woollen wick — that parlor-lamp alone is 
a sufficient claim to immortality, for its glow, 
somehow or other, makes the whole life and 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 29 

aspect of South Bradfield perceptible at a 
glance. 

The remembrance of this story heightens 
one's regret that among all the other work that 
Mr. Howells has given us, nothing else is found 
quite worthy of being set beside it ; for as time 
went on the spell of Boston grew stronger and 
stronger upon him, and we find less and less of 
the comparative freedom and spaciousness that 
appear in the three fine books that we have 
just enumerated. Individualism marked him 
for its own. He began to abuse his gift of 
observation. Instead of going always swiftly 
and unerringly to the very heart of things, he 
sometimes seemed to consider it sufficient to 
accumulate a multiplicity of trivial details and 
to let a microscopic fidelity take the place of 
a broader sympathy. The keenness of vision 
involved in some of his details is almost star- 
tling, but in the end this sort of thing defeats 
its own purpose, for the reader is so astonished 
by the photographic accuracy of the observer, 
that his attention is distracted from the march 
of events, and he can think only of how very 
clever Mr. Howells is. In other words, the brill- 
iancy of the novelist casts into a semi-shadow 
the evolution of the novel, and Mr. Howells is 
the fatally successful rival of his own creations. 



30 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

It is precisely in this respect that Thackeray 
too often suffers in comparison with Dickens ; 
for although his art is infinitely greater, it is 
not always the art that conceals itself, but an 
art that is too consciously exposed to the read- 
er's view. Thus when Dickens takes us with 
Pecksniff into Mrs. Todgers's immortal lodging- 
house, we actually go there. We snuff the 
sickly gushes of soup with our own noses, we 
see with our own eyes the worn-out floor-cloth 
and the table with its splashes of gravy, we 
hear with our own ears the convivial wit of 
Mr. Jinkins and the other commercial gentle- 
men, and for the moment Dickens has nothing 
to do with it at all. But when Thackeray de- 
scribes the similar Didnage of the Gann family 
in A Shabby Genteel Story, it is not we who 
see it for ourselves, but it is Thackeray who is 
telling us what he has seen. We are kept in 
a constant state of admiration over the ex- 
traordinary accuracy of his vision. He is al- 
ways present in his own person ; and, just as 
Mr. George Brandon reported it all to the Vis- 
count Cinqbars, so Thackeray reports it to us 
and in a somewhat similar spirit, with a con- 
stant appeal to " the principle in us that sniffs." 
It is all very brilliant ; but Mr. Howells has 
himself admitted that it has its defects ; that 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 3 1 

it is too sophisticated ; and that if, by compar- 
ison, the magic of Dickens be rough magic and 
wholly elemental, it is at least grandly ele- 
mental and deals with larger moods than those 
that respond merely to tastes and preferences. 
So it is that all of Mr. Howells's novels, ex- 
cept the ones already noted as exceptions, are 
permeated with this suggestion of his own in- 
dividuality, and with that excessive elabora- 
tion which prevents us from seeing the wood 
by reason of the trees. The writer stands be- 
tween us and his books. Moreover, though the 
details of his work may be often remarkably 
characteristic and typical, their combination 
is not necessarily either characteristic or typ- 
ical ; and while his personages may be indi- 
vidually realistic, in combination they are of- 
ten quite unreal in that they show no life and 
movement and spontaneity. One is reminded 
by them of a painting in which every figure 
is admirably finished, but in which, neverthe- 
less, the effect of the whole is stiff and wood- 
en. Mr. Howells's gallery, in other words, 
contains an immense array of careful sketches, 
but only a very few successful pictures. And 
this is why of his later books even the most 
conscientious reader retains only a shadowy 
and confused impression. The titles and scenes 



32 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

and plots (so far as there are any plots discern- 
ible) are all blurred and jumbled together ; and 
just a few strongly drawn individual portraits 
stand out in a hopeless if splendid isolation. 
One recalls the striking figure of the embezzler 
Northwick in The Quality of Mercy, wherein 
one scene is matchless in its psychology ; the 
gawky youth in The Minister s Cliarge ; Helen 
Harkness, the intensely Bostonian type of girl 
in A Woina7is Reason, who thinks that " the 
Indian trade" confers an aristocratic cachet ; 
and possibly Clara Kingsbury, though one may 
express a conscientious doubt whether even 
in Boston the ladies of the Brahminical set are 
wont to speak of their "gentleman friends;" 
but what befell these persons the present 
writer, at least, is unable to recall ; and he 
has found it necessary, at the present time, in 
every case to search through his collection of 
Mr. Howells's books in order to be quite cer- 
tain that he has assigned each character men- 
tioned to its proper source. 

The individual note is heard with even great- 
er clearness in our author's literary criticism, 
for here it has appeared to him unnecessary 
to do much more than state his own opinions 
with a dogmatism which is not less real because 
it is so often mingled vv^ith felicitous phrases 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 33 

and spiced with bits of epigram. Within the 
last two or three years, in fact, he has begun 
to issue books whose very titles — My Literary 
Passiojis and Impressions and Experiences — 
quite frankly indicate how purely personal to 
himself his judgments are. In these books we 
are told not only what opinions he has formed, 
but the exact circumstances under which he 
came to form them ; who first led him to read 
this and that ; whether he was at home or at 
his uncle's when he made his first acquaintance 
with an author ; that he was shelling peas 
when he first heard of Don Quixote ; that it 
was his elder brother who introduced him to 
Captain Marryat ; with an infinite deal of sim- 
ilar personal detail continuously presupposing 
that the reader must regard these incidental 
facts as of extreme importance. In his latest 
volume he even devotes some thirty or forty 
pages to the chronicle of his personal experi- 
ences with beggars. 

In another writer this would be egoism of a 
gigantic growth ; but in Mr. Howells it is only 
the individualism of the New-Englander ex- 
pressing itself in terms of literary criticism. 
Yet to this sort of thing is due a good deal of 
the exasperation that some of Mr. Howells's 
opinions have excited ; for while they are sim- 
3 



34 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

ply the personal views of an individual, they 
are sometimes put forth as though they were 
meant to found a school of criticism and to 
abolish the canons that have been built upon 
the intellectual experience of centuries. It 
is all very well for Mr. Howells, as an individ- 
ual, to thrust Romanticism into his ash-barrel, 
as being nothing but a piece of literary junk ; 
but when he sets up as a master of criticism, 
the matter comes to be of more importance, 
and one may then quite reasonably question 
alike his authority and his critical capacity. 
A critic who prefers Realism to Romanticism 
is well within his rights ; but when he would 
hoot Romanticism out of existence altogether 
simply because it does not happen to appeal 
to him, then we may properly suspect him of 
a defective equipment. The curious thing 
about Mr. Howells is that he makes his own 
inability to appreciate certain phases of litera- 
ture an additional claim upon our attention. 
Thus, in the chronicle of his literary passions, 
he heads a chapter with the name of Scott, 
apparently for the sole purpose of telling us, 
as he does, that though he has read Scott's 
novels, he did so wholly from a sense of duty, 
and that little or nothing of them remains with 
him at the present time. Now when a literary 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 35 

critic comes forward and declares that he has 
found nothing touching and tender in the char- 
acter of Jeanie Deans, nothing humorous in the 
portrayal of Andrew Fairservice, nothing im- 
pressively terrible in the story of Ravenswood, 
nothing breathlessly exciting in the unravel- 
ling of Bertram's weird, and nothing that stirs 
the blood like a trumpet-call in the splendid 
pictures of chivalry that stud the pages of 
Ivanhoe, and yet in the same breath announces 
that Mr. J.W. De Forest is one of the greatest 
of living novelists, then we may rightly liken 
such a critic to a person who assures us of his 
own ability as a judge of painting, and cites 
as one of his chief qualifications the fact that 
he is color-blind, and cannot tell blue from 
green. 

It is obvious that one so sensitive as Mr. 
Howells to external impressions must be sen- 
sibly affected by his environment ; and here, 
I think, is found an explanation of the com- 
parative inferiority of many of his later novels. 
This brings us to the second part of our origi- 
nal thesis — the effect upon his genius and its 
expression of his final removal from Boston to 
New York. One might argue, adducing the 
facts already set forth, that this change was 
precisely the thing needed to counteract the 



36 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

excessive individuality and concentration of 
his literary methods. But this line of argu- 
ment leaves out of sight, first, the fact that 
the change was made only after Mr. How- 
ells's formative period was over, and that 
hence it occurred too late ; and it ignores, 
in the second place, the peculiar influence 
which New York exerts upon the typical Bos- 
tonian. 

It was long ago remarked by some superfi- 
cial observer that New York is in reality not 
an American city at all ; and the saying has 
been so constantly repeated by those who 
ought to have known better, that it has come 
to be regarded as axiomatic in its truth. But 
as a matter of fact, nothing could be more 
absolutely false ; for, apart from some of its 
external characteristics. New York is the most 
truly American city in existence — the only 
city that has assimilated and moulded into a 
whole all the attributes of our people, blend- 
ing them so perfectly as to yield for a result 
not a Northern or a Southern or an Eastern or 
a Western product, but one that is simply and 
typically American. And in doing this it has 
happily eliminated one quality that is else- 
where the bane of the American temperament 
— the quality of self-consciousness. For in its 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 37 

own way the self -consciousness of Chicago, 
for example, is as marked as the self-conscious- 
ness of Boston, only the manifestation of it 
is different. Boston, being the old maid of 
American cities, displays the self-consciousness 
of primness ; while Chicago, the hobbledehoy 
of American cities, is troubled by the self-con- 
sciousness of overgrowth, and, so to speak, is 
always concerned as to what to do with its 
feet and hands, and troubled by the uneasy 
consciousness that its legs are far too long ; 
while if it wishes to speak impressively, its 
voice flies off the handle and ends in a falsetto 
squeak. In either city the individual is the 
unit of the whole, and is always sure of his own 
importance. But New York, whose quality is 
greatness rather than mere bigness, takes no 
account of the individual, and the individual 
knows it. The giant forces that are here at 
play are too vast for any one to control. They 
act and react with such a mighty sweep and 
power as to dwarf the individual altogether, 
who resembles a tiny bird that has built its 
nest in the beam of some colossal engine. It 
knows the movements of the great machine, 
it does not dread it, and it even comes to love 
it for its tremendous energy; but it would no 
more think of trying to direct or check it than 



38 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

one of us would think of bridling a cyclone or 
staying the plunge of a water-spout. In the 
sphere of civics the immensity of this great 
Weltstadt has its disadvantages, but from 
every other point of view it is wonderful and 
inspiring. No single influence can affect it. 
No great university can ever leaven it as Har- 
vard has leavened Boston ; no great literary 
movement can ever make an impression on 
it ; no wave of religious excitement can ever 
spread through all its channels; no political 
cataclysm can disorganize the play of its co- 
lossal forces. Men of commanding influence 
and national reputation come to New York, 
and take their places meekly far down the line ; 
an invading army would be run in by the po- 
lice. The giant swallows everything, takes ev- 
erything to itself, and then moves on uncon- 
scious of it and unchanged. Nothing can be 
more inspiring to one who knows it well, and 
who exults in the largeness and power and 
magnificence of it all. 

But the effect of it upon the Bostonian born 
is very curious. Catch a typical Bostonian 
and suddenly transfer him to the heart of 
Brooklyn, or Philadelphia, or New Orleans, or 
San Francisco, or even of Chicago, and while 
he will recognize the unfamiliarity of his new 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 39 

environment, it will not interfere with his en- 
joyment. He is still an important individual ; 
he is still some one to be reckoned with ; and 
those who meet him will appreciate the fact 
because they, too, are important individuals 
who count. But plump him down in the mid- 
dle of New York, and the difference is star- 
tling. A great bewilderment comes over him. 
He feels that he has somehow got out of his 
own snug little corner into a great whirl that 
bewilders him and makes him dizzy. He is 
uneasily conscious that he has been dwarfed 
to a mere human atom ; his complacency van- 
ishes ; he knows that his importance has shrunk 
into nothingness, and he doesn't like it. He 
resembles a small mouse that has crept timidly 
out into a vast hall, and then, appalled by the 
unwonted vista, scuds back to its hole with 
squeaks of genuine dismay. 

Mr. Howells has himself expressed this feel- 
ing in Their Wedding Journey, when Basil 
March and Isabel, fresh from the city of the 
triple mountain, stand before Grace Church 
and gaze up and down Broadway. And he 
has, in spite of himself, distilled the same feel- 
ing into those books of his that, written under 
the oppression of his new environment, convey 
something of that oppression to his readers' 



40 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

minds. In A Hazard of New For times and 
TJic World of CJiance one finds no more the 
unforced humor and the cheerful spontaneity 
of his earlier novels. He has become melan- 
choly, and with the true New England sense 
of duty, he has begun to feel that he has a 
"mission." 

It was in New York, apparently, that Mr. 
Howells made the discovery that while there 
are in the world people who have plenty of 
money, there are also people who haven't any 
at all to speak of ; that there are people who 
are harshly used by their employers, people 
who are often ill, people who live in squalid 
tenements — people, in a word, who are unhap- 
py through no fault of their own. To a phil- 
osophical observer these and other facts of the 
kind discovered by Mr. Howells are hardly so 
pathetic as the thoroughly ;^«z/" surprise with 
which Mr. Howells suddenly became conscious 
of their existence ; and fully as pathetic also 
is the generous but quite inartistic impulse 
that has led him to spoil his novels in order 
to impart to others some knowledge of his 
discovery. For as soon as he began to write 
stories with an obvious Tcndcnz and perme- 
ated with all the uneasiness of the Bostonian 
who is consciously out of his element, the lit- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 4I 

erary quality of his work deteriorated in a per- 
ceptible manner. Who can recall anything of 
the two books just named except squalor, and 
unhappiness, and cheap eating-houses, and 
commonplace characters of all grades of fatu- 
ity, and a general feeling that the author evi- 
dently thinks the times are out of joint ? And 
so, doubtless, they are, and always were, for 
that matter; but Mr. Howells is not going to 
set them right by publishing vague pictures 
of Altruria, and asperging all of us with his 
diluted slops of Socialism. For everything 
will go on precisely as before ; and all that he 
will have accomplished will be the transforma- 
tion of a great literary artist into a gloomy and 
ineffectual Bellamy. 

But the depression which has grown upon 
Mr. Howells in the past few years has extend- 
ed beyond his view of existing social condi- 
tions, and has been formulated into a semi- 
pessimistic theory of life. This phase of his 
thought finds its fullest expression in his 
verse, some of which is really remarkable in 
its condensed expression of a sort of won- 
dering despair, poignant and terrible. No 
single poem better reveals this state of mind 
than the following from his Stops of Various 
Quills: 



42 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

" I was not asked if I should like to come, 
I have not seen my host here since I came, 
Or had a word of welcome in his name. 
Some say that we shall never see him, and some 
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know 
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay 
I have not the least notion. None, they say, 
Was ever told when he should come or go, 
But every now and then there bursts upon 
The song and mirth a lamentable noise, 
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys 
Dumb in our breasts ; and then, some one is gone. 
They say v/e meet him. None knows where or 

when. 
We know we shall not meet him here again." 

And there comes up continually his old lament 
over the inequality that everywhere marks the 
lot of man. The sight of poverty makes him 
shudder, and the sight of riches makes him 
shudder, too. He draws us a picture of a gay 
company dancing among scarlet flowers to the 
sound of music, and then he goes on : 

" I looked again and saw that flowery space 
Stirring as if alive, beneath the tread 
That rested now upon an old man's head 
And now upon a baby's gasping face. 
Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace 

Of a girl's throat ; and what had seemed the red 
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed 
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace. 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 43 

And now and then from out the dreadful floor 
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest, 

As if to strike in madness, or implore 

For mercy ; and anon some suffering breast 

Heaved from the mass and sank ; and as before 
The revellers above them thronged and prest." 

Mr, Howells has, indeed, learned rather late 
in life a great fact which men, in general, ap- 
prehend after a very few years of observation. 
He has discovered that justice does not enter 
into the scheme of our existence here. And 
this is true. There is faith and there is truth, 
there are charity and chastity and honesty, but 
in all the world (speaking more hianano) there 
is no such thing as justice. And this discovery 
startles and appalls him, for here again his in- 
dividualism robs him of a sense of true propor- 
tion. It is the old New England trait, and it 
must be admitted that in religion and philoso- 
phy it is almost universal among men, though 
quite unreasoning and absurd. It is the con- 
viction of the individual that in the great plan 
of the universe he himself, his feelings, and his 
fate are of some importance. Doubtless, for 
instance, if Mr. Howells thinks that the narra- 
tive of his having given half a dollar to a beg- 
gar is of sufficient interest to the world at large 
to be preserved in several pages of printed text, 



44 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

he also thinks that the question of his eternal 
welfare attains an importance of inconceivable 
vastness. But all this sort of feeling, so com- 
mon in popular religious discussion, most curi- 
ously fails to recognize the infinite littleness of 
the individual and of the world itself. There 
are some who, giving law to the Deity, tell us 
that the loss of a single soul would be a ca- 
lamity so appalling as to be quite inconceiva- 
ble ; but in reality if all the men and women 
who ever lived upon this earth and who ever 
will inhabit it were swept into Gehenna at a 
stroke, what would be the real importance of 
it among the myriads of vigintillions of greater 
and more glorious worlds that swarm amid the 
infinity of space ? Suppose that once upon a 
time, thousands of years ago, in a far -dis- 
tant quarter of our globe something once went 
wrong with a mote in a sunbeam ; this would 
not be a very vital fact in the history of the 
world. Yet it would really be relatively of far 
more importance than, in its relation to the 
whole infinite universe, would be the annihi- 
lation of the mote of a world itself with all 
the human atoms that breed and die upon it. 
Why, even in his own country and among his 
own kind, the individual does not count. Let 
him be racked with pain or tortured by all the 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 45 

agony that mind and body can endure, and if 
he will but stand in his doorway he will see 
the little children laughing in the sunshine 
and hear the cackle of men and women to 
whom he is not even so much as a name. Or, 
like Ivan Ilyitch, he may lie hopeless and alone, 
watching his life ebb hourly away, and no one 
will really care. His wife, who loves him and 
whom he loves, will feel no more than a fleet- 
ing sorrow ; his child, whom he has watched 
and cherished from its birth, will never under- 
stand his anguish ; and both of them in the 
end will half resent an affliction that acts as a 
check upon their harmless pleasures. Nor can 
the individual cry out against this as a wrong, 
for God has willed it, and what He wills is 
right. 

The trouble with Mr. Howells is that he is a 
pessimist who has as yet learned only the al- 
phabet of pessimism. His eyes are opened to 
the truth, yet he still hopes on, and hence is 
torn with endless doubts. In speaking of one 
author he says : 

"While I read him I was in a world where right 
came out best, as I believe it will yet do in this world ; 
and where merit was crowned with the success which 
I believe will yet attend it in our daily life, untram- 
melled by economic circumstances." 



46 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

But there can really be no permanent halt- 
ing-place between optimism and pessimism ; 
and he who, like Mr. Howells, is pessimistic 
only up to a certain point lives in an inferno 
of his own creation ; for he sees the evils of ex- 
istence and is yet tormented by a hope that 
never can be realized. Therefore, if one would 
be at peace, he should be frankly either a con- 
sistent optimist or a profound pessimist ; for 
it is a mistake to suppose that the pessimist is 
unhappy. He is not. He is simply one who 
has no illusions, and who has once for all ac- 
cepted the inevitable. " He that is down need 
fear no fall ;" and when we come to recognize 
the fact that the very worst has happened to 
us in being born, we can share the cheerful- 
ness of him for whom this life has no surprises. 
Nor, however dark the world may appear to 
him, does he wish to leave it. His philosophy 
is that of the sagacious Greek who taught with 
great persuasiveness the doctrine that life is no 
better than death, but who, when one of his 
auditors asked him why, if life be no better 
than death, he did not hasten to leave it, re- 
plied, " Because death is no better than life." 

And, in fact, this is somewhat less than the 
entire truth, for it is always possible that death 
may be even worse than life. However firmly 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 47 

we may hold to the teachings of religion, we 
can never escape the feeling that haunted the 
great Apostle to the Gentiles when he ex- 
pressed the fear that even after he had done 
everything he might still perchance become a 
castaway. One may live up to such light as 
he possesses, yet he can never quite be sure 
that his little all will be acceptable, or that 
when the time arrives for the dissolution of 
the ties that bind the body and the soul, the 
sentient part of him may not be doomed to 
go forth shuddering into infinite loneliness and 
everlasting gloom. 

Hence, the true pessimist is not concerned 
with little things or with the multifarious evils 
that he sees about him. He knows that noth- 
ing can be done ; that, suffer as he may, he 
cannot help himself; and that in the universal 
scheme it really doesn't matter. Therefore 
his mind is untrammelled by the cares and the 
anxieties that beset his fellows. If he hopes for 
nothing, he also fears nothing, and he alone can 
see the real unimportance of all human cares. 
Physical pain may torture him, bereavement 
may wring his heart and force from him a cry 
of anguish; yet even then he can perceive the 
underlving humor of it all, the uselessness of 
complaint when one is spitted on the skewer 



48 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 

of destiny like a fly impaled upon a pin. So 
he schools himself to patience, and strives to 
acquire, not the sullen apathy of the Stoic, 
but the splendid ataraxy that Epicurus taught. 
Imbued with this, and knowing that whatever 
may befall him there is nothing that can hap- 
pen otherwise than God has willed it, he meets 
the events of life with calm composure, look- 
ing upon them all with an unruffled front, and 
with something of the divine serenity that 
marks the life of the immortal gods. 

In this short chapter, then, there have been 
briefly indicated what seem to be the salient 
points in the work of Mr. Howells — his artist- 
ry, his power of delineation, his mastery of de- 
tail, and his unerring keenness of observation ; 
and, on the other hand, the limitations that 
arise from too great subtlety, from lack of ob- 
jectivity, and from an imperfectly developed 
philosophy of life. Were it within the scope 
of this paper to dwell upon his personality, 
much more might well be said; but it is un- 
necessary. Every one who knows his work 
can feel how fine a nature lies behind it, how 
much love of truth and justice, how much 
charity, how much devotion to all that is best 
and noblest ; and every one who knows the 
man himself can tell of his unassumincf kindli- 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 49 

ness, of his generosity to young writers who 
have still their spurs to win, and of all the 
traits that make his character so winning and 
so truly typical of the high-minded American 
gentleman. 



MARCEL PREVOST 



MARCEL PREVOST 

M. Marcel Prevost is a very interesting 
figure in the contemporaneous records of 
French literature. Making his first appear- 
ance as an author only seven or eight years 
ago with two not very successful books, he 
has since then reached the position of a writer 
whose popularity places him among the very 
first of Parisian novelists. His books run into 
forty, fifty, or sixty editions within a few 
months of their first publication, and they 
have at last become a topic of discussion in 
England, where Mr, Andrew Lang has lately 
been considering their author's merits ; while 
the only productions of his that have as yet 
been rendered into English have appeared in 
this country within the past two years. 

M. Prevost did not have long to wait for 
critical recognition — a fact that in itself bears 
striking testimony to the character of his liter- 
ary workmanship ; for in a country where the 
level of artistic excellence is so very high, and 



54 MARCEL PREVOST 

where the critics, as a matter of duty, look 
coldly upon the productions of a young and 
aspiring writer who has still to show that he 
possesses something more than superficial 
cleverness and certain interesting tricks of 
style, it is not easy to attract the serious 
notice of a literary Rhadamanthus. M. Pre- 
vost's third novel, however, Mile. JaiifrCy 
which appeared in 1890, gained at once the 
attention of no less an authority than Jules 
Lemaitre, who praised the book most warmly 
in his Impressions Litteraircs ; while La Con- 
fession d'mi Amant, which was published in 
the following year, broke through even the 
austere reserve with which M. Ferdinand 
Brunetiere regards contemporary writers, and 
forced from him a cautiously uttered though 
very genuine note of admiration. L Aiitomne 
d'une Feinme, a subtle study of the woman 
whose grande passion comes to her only after 
the age of thirty years, deepened the impres- 
sion made by its immediate predecessors. 
Then followed M. Prevost's first great popu- 
lar success in two volumes of short stories, 
entitled respectively Lcttrcs dc Fcvimes and 
Nouvelles Lettrcs de Fevivics, which had an 
immense and instantaneous vogue, as did a 
somewhat similar collection entitled Notre 



MARCEL PREVOST 55 

Compagne, whose fortieth edition was an- 
nounced within three months after the vol- 
ume first saw the light. 

A writer who in eight short years has won 
alike the commendation of the critics and the 
attention of the public is certainly deserving 
of some serious consideration. His own coun- 
trymen have compared him with George Sand 
and with M. Paul Bourget ; and there are, in- 
deed, some striking points of close resemblance 
in his work to that of these two writers ; but 
in each case the comparison, in part at least, 
does something less than justice to M. Pro- 
vost. His style, indeed, has much in common 
with the style of Mme. Dudevant. It has 
her great facility and charm ; and, too, her 
literary watchward " idealize, idealize," is also 
his, as he himself declared not very long ago ; 
but with him this fluency does not, as hers did, 
pass into fluidity, while the touch of ideality is 
never for an instant suffered to obscure that 
clear impression of the actual which is as well 
sustained by him as by the stoutest champions 
of realism. For his conception of idealism 
makes it to be not so much a thing apart from 
real life and quite beyond it, as an essential 
feature of that life itself. Thus, in a paper 
on Romanticism, he asserts for the Romantic 



56 MARCEL PREVOST 

a lasting place in the sum of human life, a 
place in close association with the sphere of 
the emotions, of the passions, and of the im- 
agination. And in this he is far wiser than 
Mr. Howells, for instance, who, while kindly- 
granting to the Romantic an actual existence 
in our psychical and even in our material ex- 
perience, does hold it to be so utterly excep- 
tional as to rule it out of literary use and make 
it only the rouge and raddle of a meretricious 
art — a view of which, I think, each human life, 
if fully known, could prove the falsity. 

No less injustice is, in my opinion, done by 
any hard and fast comparison of M. Prevost's 
work with that of M. Paul Bourget. Both 
writers are extremely psychological, but with 
a difference. M. Bourget is psychological and 
little else. His novels, while their exposi- 
tion of conflicting motives is most curiously 
keen, and while he can pursue it through all 
its convolutions and tortuous complications, 
are nevertheless, or rather for this very reason, 
at times distinctly tedious. They often seem 
almost to have the character of laboratory 
demonstrations, and one's head often aches 
as he labors through their fine-spun mazes 
of analysis. But M. Prevost, while also very 
subtle, does not make his psychological stud- 



MARCEL PRKVOST 57 

ies so portentous, nor spin them out to such a 
grievous length. He rather, by a few master- 
ly and incisive touches, throws a vivid light 
into the very heart of a situation, reveals as 
by a flash a mental attitude, and thus accom- 
plishes whatever M. Bourget can accomplish 
with all his slow accumulation of detail. It 
may be that M. Bourget's psychology is more 
profound ; but it is certain that M. Prevost's 
is much better held in hand, and that his use 
of it is far more consonant with literary art. 
It helps, in other words, his purpose ; it does 
not constitute that purpose. It is with him a 
means and not an end. 

In fact, if I were asked to name a modern 
writer as being one to whom M. Prevost is in 
his workmanship most closely kin, I should 
unhesitatingly choose out Guy de Maupassant. 
M. Prevost possesses the same swift, definite, 
and unerring manner, the same compactness, 
the same muscular grasp upon his material, 
the same deft touch and lucid presentation. 
Yet here, again, one must at once begin to 
qualify. In spite of a most striking super- 
ficial likeness, the spirit of the two is not 
the same. M. de Maupassant was saturated 
with the joyless pessimism of modern France. 
His cynical acceptance of the darkest side of 



58 MARCEL PREVOST 

life as wholly normal, his torturing, agonizing 
hopelessness, the moral gloom of his horizon, 
the grim despair that, as one reads his work, 
sink down upon the heart like an overpower- 
ing weight — all these are alien to the pages of 
Marcel Prevost. For he is not, in many of his 
moods, a Frenchman of the modern school, 
but rather a reversion to an earlier type, the 
Frenchman of the sixteenth century, the ^(7z7- 
lai'd, the gaj^ adventurer, witty and gallant, 
convinced that he is wholly irresistible, and 
with a roguish eye wide open for some bonne 
fortune. This spirit is most clearly seen in his 
short stories, than which no better illustration 
of the esprit Gaiilois can be found ; and here 
the temperamental contrast and also the sty- 
listic likeness are most readily observed. Nor 
can one say, in opposition to this view, that 
Maupassant has also lighter moods and even 
moments of true tenderness, as shown respec- 
tively in La Patronne, that most audacious 
story of a young (ftndiant de droit, and in Le 
Pere dc Simon. For the difference lies just 
here : when Maupassant is simply droll or 
simply tender, he is not really at his best, 
while Prevost is. The finest work of Mau- 
passant is never seen in tales like these, but 
in such bits of concentrated cynicism as Un 



MARCEL PREVOST 59 

Sage and Boulc de Snif; while Provost's gen- 
ius is most happy in those witty and ingenious 
talcs, of which La Mc'daillc and La Nuit de 
Rayvwnde are typical illustrations ; and when 
he takes a turn at cynicism he is distinctly ill 
at ease and less artistic. 

A critical comparison of the novels of the 
two will lead one to the same conclusion. 
Take, for example, Maupassant's powerful but 
quite repulsive Bel Ami and read it side by 
side with Prevost's L Autovine d'une Fcinme. 
In Bel Ami is shown a world of absolute and 
utter baseness, a world of prostitutes and 
scoundrels. Not one of all its characters is 
anj'thing but vile, from the hero of the book 
(a sorry hero) to the nymphomaniac Clotilde 
de Marelle, and Mme. Walter, and her sly, pre- 
cocious daughter Suzanne. This unrelieved 
depravity, as Mr. Henry James has pointed 
out, is really inartistic ; for the very effect 
which the writer apparently desires to pro- 
duce would have been more strikingly attain- 
ed had he availed himself of the aid of con- 
trast and drawn his darkest figures on a lighter 
background ; and furthermore, the mind in- 
stinctively revolts from the inherent falsity 
of such a picture, feeling at once that if man- 
kind and womankind had really sunk so low as 



6o MARCEL PREVOST 

this, society could not be held together for a 
single day. 

Far different is the moral and artistic atti- 
tude of M. Pr6vost in L Automne d' une Femme. 
It may be said that this fine novel, by far the 
best its author has produced, is one whose 
story is extremely sad ; and this is true. But 
sadness is a thing far different from horror 
and despair; and neither horror nor despair 
finds any place in the melancholy half-light of 
this searching study. It tells, to summarize it 
very "briefly, of a charming and pure-minded 
woman, Julie Surgere, married, or rather sold, 
as a young girl to a repellent brute, who pres- 
ently is stricken by a strange disease that makes 
of him a living corpse. The years go on, and 
at last the son of one of her husband's part- 
ners, Maurice Artoy, a young man, crosses her 
path. She nurses him through an illness, and in- 
sensibly drifts into a tender and self-sacrificing 
love for him, a love that is her first. But she is 
much older than he, and in time he is attracted 
by the fresher beauty of a young girl, Claire 
Esquier, the daughter of another partner, and 
an inmate of her own home. The elder wom- 
an, who is fond of Claire, and who sees that 
Maurice every day is growing colder, renounces 
him and all her dreams of happiness, and lets 



MARCEL PREVOST 6l 

him marry her unconscious rival, while she 
herself suffers in silence and looks forward to 
a life of sorrow and self-abnegation. The 
treatment of this theme is the antithesis of 
anything that can be found in Maupassant. 
The hero of the book, Maurice Artoy, is, to 
be sure, as disagreeable as any of Maupassant's 
creations. He is a sentimental sensualist, and, 
if possible, is more repulsive even than Georges 
Duroy in Bel Ami — Duroy the thorough-paced 
blackguard, the sublimation of a type that finds 
its genesis in the viaqncrcau of the Faubourg 
St. Antoine. But Artoy's baseness and his 
selfishness serve only to bring out in strong 
relief the truth and beauty of the other char- 
acters — of Claire, the innocent young girl, her 
father Jean Esquier, the soul of honor and fidel- 
ity, and Julie Surgere herself, loving wrong- 
fully, indeed, but with a love which is more 
than half maternal, and whose sacrifice con- 
signs her to a life of sorrow that expiates her 
fault. There is passion here, and there is sin ; 
but there are also remorse and repentance 
and an infinite tenderness. Nothing could be 
more admirable than the self-restraint with 
which M. Prevost has managed the develop- 
ment of the theme, and nothing more delicate 
than the art that finds expression in this novel, 



62 MARCEL PREVOST 

which as the study of a love outworn need not 
avoid comparison with George Sand's great 
masterpiece, Lucrezia Floriani. 

From what has now been said it can be 
readily inferred what are the leading qualities 
that give M. Prevost his marked distinction: a 
nearly perfect style, a very subtle insight into 
all the workings of the human mind, and a 
touch of ideality that differentiates his work 
from that of the uncompromising realists who 
ignore the one thing that is wanting to breathe 
life into their creations and make them truly 
vital and convincing. His minor literary virt- 
ues are equally conspicuous. Some one has 
said of the modern pessimistic school in fic- 
tion, whose foremost representative to-day is 
Gabriele D'Annunzio, that they are afraid to 
be amusing; and to this generalization M. 
Prevost is a most agreeable exception. A 
rare and irresistible drollery abounds in nearly 
all his lesser fiction ; and even his most cynical 
tales are lightened and relieved by a brilliant 
wit that is very far to seek in most of his con- 
temporaries. His ingenuity and intellectual 
dexterity are also most surprising ; so that 
one's breath is often taken quite away by the 
unexpectedness and audacity of his invention. 
Sometimes, again, he touches on the sphere of 



MARCEL PREVOST 63 

the mysterious and occult, and then his art re- 
calls the art of Poe, as in La Demoiselle au 
Chat d'Or, a curiously weird conception whose 
power is enhanced by the simplicity and re- 
straint of the form in which the narrative is 
cast. 

It must, of course, be understood that what 
has just been said of M. Prevost's work is 
said of what is best in all that work. He 
has undoubtedly at times sunk far below his 
higher level, and has put his name to things 
that bear the marks of unadulterated medioc- 
rity. Two general criticisms have been lev- 
elled at him and may very briefly be consider- 
ed here. The first is one that equally applies 
to Maupassant and many others of the writers 
of French fiction. The very French and, to 
an Anglo-Saxon mind, unpardonable freedom 
that he often gives himself in his selection of 
a theme, makes many of his works, and nearly 
all his shorter stories, quite impossible for any 
but a Frenchman to admire without a qualm. 
With him the eonte leste touches on the very 
limits of audacity and unreserve ; and even the 
most hardened reader of contemporary conti- 
nental fiction is sometimes startled by the un- 
expected daring of his fancy. 

Yet this much may at least be said in his 



64 MARCEL PREVOST 

behalf. He never, like M. de Maupassant, 
descends to any coarseness or offensiveness 
of phrase, but writes invariably in language 
whose discretion and extraordinary delicacy 
in part redeem his subject from that grossness 
and offensiveness which in the hands of any 
purely naturalistic writer it would certainly 
possess. In all that he has published, not a 
single page exists so thoroughly detestable as 
Maupassant's La Femme de Paul, of which the 
hideous brutality is fitly matched by its inartis- 
tic crudity of treatment. In Prevost's little 
story called An Caharet\\\Q same theme is just 
touched upon, yet the difference in the hand- 
ling is remarkable. The underlying thought 
is one that no Anglo-Saxon would ever for a 
moment dream of using as the basis of a story ; 
but in Prevost's hands it is a mere suggestion 
rather than a boldly voiced motif ; and the 
tale itself, in spite of its essential impropriety, 
leaves on the mind no lingering taint, but 
rather, by the artful use of contrast, a strong 
impression of the power of innocence and of 
the lurking good that lingers somewhere even 
in the loathliest. And so in all his work there 
can be found a glimpse, a hint, of something 
better, a certain humanity and warmth that 
save the writer and the reader, too, from an 



MARCEL PREVOST 65 

unmitigated cynicism. Nor should one fail to 
note that some of his most perfect writing is 
morally impeccable. He has written several 
short stories that are as pure in thought as 
they are exquisite in literary finish, and these 
display, as in a drop of crystal, all his finest 
gifts — his power of compression, his unerring 
insight into character, his humor, his sym- 
pathy, and his moving pathos. 

Besides the censure of the moralist, how- 
ever, M. Pr6vost has often had to meet an- 
other criticism which, from the artistic point 
of view, is far more serious. Not long ago I 
said to a distinguished critic who had spoken 
rather slightingly of Prevost's work : 

" What is the real reason for your prejudice 
against Provost ? Why will you not admit his 
right to rank with Maupassant ?" 

And he replied : 

" Because I feel that Maupassant is quite 
sincere and that Provost is not." 

This confident assertion of his " insincerity" 
is rather common among the critics of Prevost, 
though less, I think, in France than in this coun- 
try, where it has almost become a formula. It 
rests, in my opinion, wholly on a desultory and 
imperfect knowledge of his writings. In the 
case of the critic who has just been quoted, a 
5 



66 MARCEL PREVOST 

further conversation showed that he had never 
read a single one of Prcvost's longer novels, 
nor even all his shorter stories ; and he very 
frankly said that his opinion was largely the 
result of some casual conversation with Pre- 
vost himself. How thoroughly unfair is any 
judgment formed in such a fashion, one scarce- 
ly needs to say. As a matter of fact, this un- 
favorable opinion in general is chiefly due to 
the bad impression produced by a single novel 
of Prevost's, Lcs Devii-Vicrges. It is, indeed, 
unfortunate that of all his writings this was 
the first to be rendered into English. It is still 
more unfortunate that he ever wrote it at all, 
for it is entirely unworthy of his genius. A 
bit of pure sensationalism and distorted psy- 
chology, untrue to life and quite offensive in 
its treatment, it shows the writer at his very 
worst, and strikes a thoroughly discordant 
note. Whoever judges him by this may read- 
ily be pardoned for ranking him with writers 
like Adolphe Belot and Paul Ginisty ; but 
surely no serious criticism of a literary artist 
ought ever to be made to rest upon the read- 
ing of a single book. 

Le Jardin Secret^ the latest novel that M. 
Pr6vost has written, has a very special inter- 
est. Of all his works this is the one that from 
I 



MARCEL PREVOST 67 

the very moment of its publication met a per- 
fectly respectful treatment at the critics' hands, 
and it may, I think, be styled one of the most 
important works of fiction that the French 
have lately given us. It had in France, of 
course, the great advantage of being the first 
long novel written by its author since his liter- 
ary gifts were generally recognized ; but quite 
apart from this, it well deserves a careful study: 
and I think that from some points of view its 
interest is even greater for an English or an 
American reader than for the fellow-country- 
men of its creator. 

Its story is narrated by one Mme. Marthe 
Lecoudrier, who is its central figure. She is 
the wife of Jean Lecoudrier, the head of a de- 
partment in a banking-house, Le Credit Com- 
mercial, and hence the story has to do with 
the life and the environment of the bourgeoisie 
mc'diocre. At the commencement of the novel, 
M. Lecoudrier has left her for a few days' visit 
to his early home, Ingrandes, where his uncle 
has just died and willed him a small property. 
The wife, sitting alone throughout the even- 
ing in her apartment, with her little daughter 
sleeping quietly in an adjoining room, falls 
into a reminiscent mood, and for the first time 
in many years begins to summon up the recol- 



68 MARCEL PREVOST 

lections of her girlhood, of la Martlie (T au- 
trefois, a girl ambitious, eager for a brilliant 
career, hopeful of a literary, and ultimately 
of a social, triumph. As she recalls her past, 
she smiles at the contrast afforded by her pres- 
ent life, the life of a bonne bourgeoise, satisfied 
with a humdrum existence and with long, un- 
eventful days of peace and commonplace con- 
tentment. Presently her eye falls upon a draw- 
er of her husband's desk from which a bunch of 
keys projects. Without much purpose she opens 
it and half mechanically turns over a packet of 
papers which the drawer contains. At once her 
attention is arrested. With a beating heart 
she unties the packet and finds in it the evi- 
dence of a secret whose existence she had 
never dreamed of. It holds a number of pho- 
tographs, a bunch of artificial flowers from a 
woman's hat, letters signed with the names 
of women quite unknown to her, a child's por- 
trait, and finally a bundle of government se- 
curities to the value of thirty thousand francs 
or more, from which the coupons have been 
regularly cut. A careful reading of the letters 
and an examination of the other articles lead 
her irresistibly to certain definite conclusions; 
that her husband has been for years untrue to 
her, that he has somewhere another child, and 



MARCEL PREVOST 69 

that unknown to her he has set apart a sum of 
money whose income is devoted to the pur- 
poses of the other Hfe that he has lived apart 
from her. But there is even more to be in- 
ferred than this. A number of letters from 
Ingrandes, written apparently by a confiden- 
tial servant, give her reasons for believing that 
her husband's family is one afflicted by a ten- 
dency to epilepsy; and she recalls with a thrill 
of horror certain mysterious seizures that he 
has sometimes suffered from, and that have 
once or twice already appeared in her own 
young child. Her heart dies within her as 
she sits down to consider the revelation that 
has come to her. She has been deceived in 
every possible way in which a woman can be 
duped, and for the moment she is stunned. 
A terrible feeling of despair comes over her, 
followed by a flaming fever of indignation. 
Yet may she not be quite mistaken ? May 
there not be, after all, an explanation pos- 
sible that will be consistent with her hus- 
band's truth and constancy? When morning 
comes she hurries to an agency which gives 
renseignements intimes particulicrs dans I'm- 
t(frct des families — in other words, a sort of 
private detective bureau. To its chief she 
confides the compromising packet and asks 



70 MARCEL PREVOST 

for informations discretes. An immediate and 
absolute divorce is in her mind, and she waits 
in a state of almost unendurable impatience 
for the confirmation of the apparent facts, and 
for the evidence that will set her free from a 
man so stained with treachery. For the mo- 
ment a dumb, helpless rage inspires her — a 
passionate longing for revenge. Soon, how- 
ever, when another day has dragged along, a 
strong reaction comes upon her, a physical 
lassitude, a sort of moral cowardice resulting 
from an exhausting waste of energy. 

" I feel like letting everything just go, without tak- 
ing the trouble to set matters right, without saying a 
word to my husband, without doing a single thing. 
. . . For a woman nearly forty years of age to leave 
her home like one of Ibsen's heroines, just because 
she has been deceived — this really seems to me, at 
three o'clock in the afternoon, somewhat absurd. For 
the first time I consider the question of remaining, 
with all the conscious superiority which my knowl- 
edge of Jean's secrets would give me — remaining, in 
fact, for my revenge. A sort of nerveless indecision 
has got hold of me. The thing is wholly in my hands 
— the household need not be upset; nothing need be 
changed in what Goethe's Egmont calls ' the amicable 
habits of one's life.' And, after all, this life with Jean 
would be endurable." 

For the first time she begins to realize how 



MARCEL PREVOST 71 

wonderfully close, how almost irrefragable are 
the ties which years of married life can weave ; 
how all the little incidents and intimacies of 
the home, the myriad interests that man and 
wife possess in common, the very sight of one 
another day after day for years, establish a 
powerful habit, and constitute a bond almost 
impossible to break. 

" And, therefore, even the association of two beings 
who are quite indifferent to one another may come to 
be with the help of time an affectionate and lasting 
union of two souls united in reality. . . . For it is not 
the words of the marriage service that constitute the 
essence of true marriage, nor is it even mutual love, 
when that exists ; for words are only of the lips, and 
love may really be the negation of a marriage. A 
man and a woman are truly married only when they 
have become, through the influence of their life to- 
gether, kindi'cd, as when two persons are allied by 
blood. When the wife has become to the husband 
that sister of whom the Canticle makes mention, then 
only is the marriage truly consummated. This mys- 
tical process lies in a gradual transformation, of which 
neither of the pair has any consciousness until it has 
been actually wrought. No matter, then, how the 
laws may at any future time transform and modify its 
legal basis, so long as the life together and the com- 
munity of interests remain, for just so long will mar- 
riage, as we understand it now, continue to exist." 

Nevertheless, she gets from the detective 



72 MARCEL PREVOST 

bureau facts which show that all her fears are 
true ; that all her wrongs are very real ; and 
they include names and dates and information 
as to places which make all further doubt im- 
possible. But in the meantime something else 
has come to her. The reminiscent mood that 
had begun upon the very evening of her terri- 
ble discovery returns. In judging her husband 
and condemning him as false to her, she calls 
to mind her own past years of life. She knows 
his secrets ; she has entered into that retreat 
which he had thought secure against invasion. 
But has she not herself some carefully seclud- 
ed jardin secret of memory which, could he 
likewise enter, he would find as eloquent of 
treachery to him ? The question deeply moves 
her, and her secret consciousness makes her 
shrink and shudder at the thought. Can she 
pronounce a judgment upon him and be her- 
self quite free from condemnation ? She meets 
the question, at first evasively, and at last un- 
flinchingly. She will summon up her past and 
judge it just as mercilessly as she judged her 
husband's. 

She goes back to her years of girlhood and 
its varied incidents. She remembers how her 
father, a cJief de gare, had misappropriated 
money to waste it at the gaming-table and 



MARCEL PREVOST 73 

in other forms of dissipation. She brings to 
mind his pitiful disgrace, his conviction and 
imprisonment as a felon, her later years of 
shabbiness and squalor. She recalls how, af- 
ter he had died, she had become a sort of gov- 
erness, and then had met in her employer's 
family the son of a rich Belgian manufacturer 
and had loved him. She thinks once more of 
how she used to meet him secretly, and how 
these meetings, though quite innocent, were 
broken off when he was ordered by his parents 
to end the undesirable entanglement, and how 
her lover had obeyed because he feared to 
jeopardize for a woman's sake his hope of fort- 
une. She thinks of how, when she was still 
tormented by the agony and shame of this re- 
jection, a lady who was interested in her had 
proposed to bring about her marriage with M. 
Lecoudrier, whom she had never met, and of 
whom she knew no more than that he was re- 
ported fairly prosperous and of good repute. 
After a meeting or two she had accepted him, 
and a Diariage de convcnance'hdid been arranged. 
Her mind reverts to her thirteen years of 
married life. She remembers how, at first, the 
novelty of her surroundings, the comparative 
ease of her environment, her pleasure in being 
mistress of her husband's house and in the 



74 MARCEL PRfiVOST 

kindness and consideration with wliich he al- 
ways treated her, had satisfied her mind and 
gradually tranquillized her. The birth of a 
daughter had bound her still more closely to 
her husband. But there came a time when all 
these things had palled upon her, when her 
home and all its duties had become unspeak- 
ably monotonous, when even her child had 
ceased to interest her, and when the prospect 
of a humdrum life of bourgeois dulness had be- 
come intolerable. Her old-time restlessness 
and craving for excitement were again awak- 
ened, and their satisfaction took the form of 
gallantry. She recalls how she began to accept 
and even seek the notice of those men about 
her who were young and easily toques. Then 
came a period of flirtation, of sentimental 
friendships such as certain types of men and 
women frequently affect — professedly Platonic 
liaisons in which the vocabulary of friendship 
is consciously substituted for the language of 
love, and in which the pressure of hands, the 
solitude (X deux, and the valsc significative play 
an important part. But as Platonic friendships 
seldom fill up all the blanks in the carte tendre 
of a woman's life, it was not long before a much 
more serious affair occurred, when a certain 
Captain Landouzic became a frequent visitor 



MARCEL PREVOST 75 

in her drawing-room. This person, represent- 
ing le type biifflc — forceful, violent, and a good 
deal of a brute — was the sort of man who al- 
ways has a singular attraction for women of 
the sensitive, imaginative, half- neurotic tem- 
perament, who seem to find in the presence 
of a nature so completely physical something 
that rests their nerves and roughly overrides 
their finical hesitations. And it was so in this 
case ; for, as she now remembers but too well, 
in no long time Landouzie had completely 
dominated Marthe Lecoudrier ; and she was 
saved from taking the final step onl}^ by an 
unexpected incident that called him hastily to 
join his regiment. A long and serious illness 
followed ; and at its end her period of storm 
and stress was over. From that time down to 
the discovery of her husband's secret she had 
lived contentedly the life that once had seem- 
ed quite unendurable. 

She thinks of all these episodes, and as she 
thinks of them she feels that it is not for her 
to sit in judgment on her husband. She took 
him in the beginning without asking any ques- 
tions, just as he took her. If he concealed the 
physical taint that rested on his race, so had 
she equally concealed the social taint that her 
father's crime had fastened on herself. If her 



76 MARCEL PREVOST 

husband came to her with the memory of other 
loves in mind, so had she come to him distract- 
ed by the loss of the only man she ever cared 
for, and one of whom the recollection still 
made any thought of marriage with another 
seem detestable. Her husband had professed 
no love for her, and she had equally professed 
no love for him. And after marriage, if she 
now knew that he had not lived for her alone, 
her conscience told her that she had not truly 
lived for him ; and that while she had never 
actually broken any vows as he had done, she 
still was morally as bad as he, since circum- 
stances, rather than her will, had saved her. 
Recalling all her past and weighing it against 
his secret, she hesitates no more. His faults 
are balanced by her own, and henceforth she 
will banish both forever from her memory and 
live with this thought always in her mind, 
that " from to-day, and only from to-day, I am 
in very truth a zvifd' 

Such is the outline of the story upon which 
Marcel Prevost has built his latest novel. So 
far as it possesses any moral, it appears to be 
intended to assert that every woman of thirty 
years of age or more who will look carefully 
into the souvenirs of her past, will find among 
the fruits of her experience quite enough to 



MARCEL PREVOST 77 

make her charitable in her judgment of the 
other sex who have temptations such as she 
is largely shielded from. To this assertion 
many readers will very naturally demur ; and 
as for M. Prevost's view that every human 
being, man or woman, has his or \\q.x jardin 
secret, this thought is hardly new enough to 
justify the writing of a novel to expound it ; 
for, indeed, it was set forth by Thackeray 
many years ago in one of his most striking 
passages. The interest of the book for M. 
Provost's countrymen is, therefore, probably to 
be found in the skill and subtlety of its literary 
workmanship and in the innumerable touches 
that show so rare an understanding of the 
working of a woman's mind. 

But to the American and the English read- 
er this novel has an interest of a very different 
sort. These will perceive in it not only an en- 
tertaining story, a work of literary charm, an- 
other lucid and elaborate study of the eivig 
We lb lie he ; but, more than this, a document 
containing very valuable evidence as to the 
physiological and psychic basis of the mariage 
de convenance. Than this there is perhaps no 
social institution that more deeply interests 
the Anglo-Saxon student of French manners, 
as there is none more utterly at variance with 



yS MARCEL PREVOST 

'Anglo-Saxon sentiment and prejudice. To 
find a keen observer, therefore, like M. Pre- 
vost, unconsciously affording us so accurate a 
demonstration of its practical results, is mar- 
vellously interesting ; nor should one pass over 
this demonstration without at least a general 
indication of what seems to be its obvious 
teaching. 

The French assert, in explaining and defend- 
ing their peculiar institution, that in the long 
run the happiness of marriage depends far 
more upon material considerations and upon 
environment than upon an actual affinity of 
two persons at the time of marriage. Given 
any conceivable amount of love between the 
two, this still must wane in time ; and sooner 
or later the union must rest upon a different 
basis from that of sentiment alone. Therefore, 
in the inariagc de convcnance, this basis is most 
carefully arranged beforehand by the family 
council, viewing with practical and unromantic 
eyes the permanent interests of both the prin- 
cipals. It is essential, for example, that they 
should be of equal, or of nearly equal, social 
rank ; that there should be no great disparity 
in age ; that character and temperament should 
be considered ; and that the united incomes of 
the two should be sufficient to assure them all 



MARCEL PREVOST 79 

the comforts to which they have been hitherto 
accustomed, and to guarantee a suitable provi- 
sion for the presumptive responsibilities of the 
future. A second proposition which relates to 
the sentimental side of marriage is accepted as 
essentially complemental to the first. As love 
is, in its very last analysis, held to be a purely 
physical affair, and as it is inspired by mere 
proximity, its evocation may be safely counted 
on as an inevitable incident of any properly 
considered marriage. That is to say, if the 
young girl be educated in seclusion, so that no 
attachment for another has come to her before 
her marriage, the purely emotional side of her 
nature will at marriage be still a tabula rasa, a 
fair white page, on which her husband may in- 
scribe his name and win the affection which 
among ill-regulated Teutonic peoples he seeks 
to do as a preliminary to betrothal. Then, 
when in course of time the married pair adjust 
themselves to the relation that is to end at 
death alone, the wife has no remembrance of 
any other attachment to impair a single-mind- 
ed^ interest in her husband ; and with a com- 
fortable environment and an assured provision, 
both go through life's long journey hand-in- 
hand, unvexed by unforeseen anxieties, serene 
and confident, and with that complete tran- 



8o MARCEL PREVOST 

quilHty which is the most secure of all founda- 
tions for mutual affection and esteem. The 
scheme is beautifully logical ; it possesses the 
lucidity, completeness, and simplicity that are 
so characteristic of all French theory ; it is 
based upon that intensely material view of 
life which in France has come to be a national 
possession ; and it has about it something of 
the impenetrable hardness which, with all their 
superficial sentiment, remains the one eternal- 
ly and profoundly significant trait that under- 
lies French character. 

But the Anglo-Saxon, who is never infatu- 
ated with any theory whatever merely because 
it is logical and lucid, and who has a most un- 
comfortable way of looking at its practical ap- 
plication, entertains some definite objections 
to this view of marriage ; and two of these may 
be restated here, because this book of M. Pre- 
vost seems to shed some light upon the ques- 
tions they involve. Assuming (which is a good 
deal to assume) that these businesslike and 
scientific marriages are really so extremely 
well arranged that women are never sacrificed 
to brutes, and that men are never tricked into a 
union with women whom they would not think 
of choosing for themselves, what is the actual 
relation of all these arrangements to the worn- 



MARCEL PREVOST 8l 

an's happiness? When a young and innocent 
girl, brought up in a conventual seclusion, is 
handed over to a man whom she has scarcely 
ever seen and for whom she can have no par- 
ticular prepossession, what, one may ask, are 
probably her feelings ? It may be true, as Mr. 
Howells very delicately puts it, that man is 
still imperfectly monogamous ; but it is also 
true that woman is essentially monandrous ; 
and this implies the right of choice, since it is 
a negation of the masculine promiscuity. Does 
she then, in fact, so very readily adjust herself 
to a situation which to her is quite unique ? 
Does she not, when roughly thrust into the 
intimacy of married life, feel a revolt so strong 
as to make her husband more or less an object 
of repulsion to her? This very natural inquiry 
gets a sort of answer from M. Prevost. I give 
his dictum in the very words that he has placed 
in the mouth of Marthe Lecoudrier : 

" Comment font toutes les autres, qui n'ont meme 
pas cette aide, petites bourgeoises quelconques que 
Ton marie commeon m'a mariee? Passent-elles outre 
les repugnances, grace a. leur naturelle inertia, a una 
vague et bestiale curiosite, ou simplement au desir 
niais d'avoir un menage, d'etre ' Madame ? Au fond, 
je crois que chez beaucoup de jeunes filles la peur de 
riiomme inconnu n'est pas telle que Ic bruit en court, 
6 



82 MARCEL PREVOST 

et que se I'imagine le petit nombre de celles que resi- 
dent au sommet de I'echelle des etres sensitifs. Beau- 
coup de jeunes filles n'ont aucune vraie pudeur. La 
pudeur leur est apprise, suggeree, comme un principe 
de sage economic generale : a savoir, qu'une femme 
perd un avantage a se donner. Mais elles n'eprouvent 
nulle gene a s'etendre a cote d'un homme, du moment 
que la perte est regulierement compensee, que I'usage 
social est respecte, qu'elles-memes sont sures de faire 
'comme tout le monde.' . . . Oui, il faut I'avouer ! 
ces pauvres raisons suffisent a I'immense majorite 
des jeunes 6pouses ! On fait ' comme tout le monde,' 
dans une circonstance ou la vraie noblesse d'ame com- 
manderait de faire comme soi-meme, comme soi seul." 

This surely is a very C3mical defence, for it 
resolves itself into an expansion of the famous 
line of Pope that " every woman is at heart a 
rake," a saying which, by the way, was not 
original with Pope, but was drawn by him 
from a quite Gallic epigram of Jehan de 
Meung. Yet M. Prevost thoroughly believes 
in it; for in this very novel his account of the 
early days of the Lecoudriers' liine dc mid is 
but a concrete illustration of the same idea, 
recalling an extremely curious passage in 
Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maiipin^ where that 
adventurous young woman in her male dis- 
guise spends the first night of her freedom in 
a rustic inn. The Anglo-Saxon, with his great- 



MARCEL PREVOST 83 

er reverence for women, will not find such an 
apologia conclusive. 

But something far more subtle and more 
vitally important still remains. M. Provost 
depicts his heroine when, by the accepted 
theory of the mariagc dc convenance, she 
should have reached the period of tranquil- 
lity, as a true boiirgeoise sotiniise, suddenly be- 
coming restless, bored, enniiyde, eager for ex- 
citement, and ready to seek it elsewhere than 
at home. Why is this so ? It seems to vitiate 
the principle laid down by all the social phi- 
losophers who defend the view of marriage 
which prevails in France. M. Prevost ex- 
plains it by a reference to what he styles la 
crise. Again I give his very words : 

" II y a un moment ou une femme qui jusque-la a 
ete satisfaite par le mariage, arrive a souhaiter autre 
chose. . . . Quand le regime conjugal est enfin etabli, 
quand raccoutumance est complete, aussitSt I'epouse 
sent que ce trouble delicieux, ce trouble anterieur 
lui manque. Regret du passe chez Thonnete femme, 
desir de I'aventure chez les autres ; combien eprou- 
vent le besoin d'un noiiveau viariage, oil tout ce qu'il 
y cut d'exquis dans la premiere initiation se recom- 
mence !" 

These very frank statements will seem to the 
Ano-lo-Saxon reader an unconscious condem- 



84 MARCEL PREVOST 

nation of the whole theory of marriage which 
prevails in France, and to support by implica- 
tion the Teutonic view. For the Teutonic 
view assumes that the love on which alone a 
happy marriage can be based, so far from be- 
ing allied solely with the senses, is a far more 
spiritual thing — an exaltation arising, first of 
all, from certain psychical affinities between 
two persons whose temperament exactly fits 
them for each other. It has in it, on the one 
side, an element of maternal affection, and on 
the other something of the self-devotion and 
disinterestedness involved in ties of blood re- 
lationship. It cannot be called forth indiffer- 
ently by one person as well as by another, but 
must spring from an instinctive recognition of 
the subtle fitness of two natures for each oth- 
er ; and it is based, therefore, upon that prin- 
ciple of selection which is one of the most 
profound and universal of all natural laws. 
When, moreover, it is thus evoked, it so com- 
pletely moulds and masters every faculty of 
mind and body as to preclude the possibility 
of any other similar and coexistent sentiment. 
In its fullest and most perfect evocation it ap- 
pears but once in any human life ; and that it 
should be thus permitted to appear is both a 
physiological and a psychological necessity. 



MARCEL PREVOST 85 

The nature that through special circumstances 
has never known it has been cheated of its 
rights ; and the whole being, whether con- 
sciously or unconsciously, will sooner or later 
rise up in revolt. Thus, as M. Huysmans in 
En Route declares (and I have heard the state- 
ment vouched for by very eminent ecclesias- 
tics of the Catholic Church), even in the cloister 
there comes a time in the life of the most de- 
voted religieuse when she finds with dismay 
that her existence is becoming quite intoler- 
able, when her best -loved duties fail to inter- 
est her, and when a mysterious lassitude creeps 
over mind and body. She, in her innocence and 
inexperience, does not understand its meaning, 
but her superiors do. They know it to be the 
crise, the mighty instinct of womanhood crying 
out within her, and they dread the outcome ; 
for with many nuns it assumes the form of 
physical decline and ends in early death. 

Now, in the mariage de convenance, which 
takes into account the physiological phase 
alone, and disregards a very vital psychic 
truth, the crise still lingers in the background 
to be reckoned with hereafter. It has not nec- 
essarily been coincident with marriage, but it 
may still occur at any time to overturn the 
scientifically accurate arrangements of the con- 



86 MARCEL PREVOST 

sell de faniille and to provide the writers of 
French fiction with the particular sort of in- 
cident which forms the staple of their literary 
studies. In the Teutonic marriage, on the 
other hand, the crise is not a factor in the later 
matrimonial problem, for it has been synchro- 
nous with the marriage rite. Nature, which is 
mightier than Art, has had her due ; and hence- 
forth there exists in the mind of the wife no 
lingering dissatisfaction, no vaguely curious 
yearning after what M. Prevost calls Vhomine 
providcntiel. The basis for a lasting sympathy 
has been securely laid ; and man and wife live 
out their days together, bound fast by ties that 
do not gall, and that are infinitely stronger than 
those imposed in selfish bargaining and nice 
consideration of the dot — by ties, in fact, which 
will survive external shock, and which adver- 
sity itself will only knit more closely in bring- 
ing out through sacrifice of self the pure de- 
votion and eternal tenderness that blend two 
hearts in one and constitute the sacramental 
mystery of marriage. 



GEORGE MOORE 



GEORGE MOORE 

A YEAR or two ago M. Emile Zola made a 
sort of pilgrimage to London, and was there 
received with the overwhelming and indiscrim- 
inate attention which the English always give 
to the latest lion, whether he be a great bene- 
factor of the human race or a King of the Can- 
nibal Islands. Foremost among the throng 
that hastened to welcome the distinguished 
exponent of naturalism was observed a learned 
judge who, only a short time before, had sent 
a publisher to prison for issuing an English 
version of one of M. Zola's works ; and this cir- 
cumstance was very naturally taken as a text 
by the Continental press for sermons anent 
the hypocrisy and insincerity of the British 
nation. A perusal of the books produced of 
late by Mr. George Moore gives rise to some- 
what similar reflections. 

■ Ten years ago, Mr. Moore's first great suc- 
cess, A Mimmier s Wife, was the talk of liter- 
ary London, and was sending thrills of horror 



go GEORGE MOORE 

down the spines of the Phihstines. It was 
cast out of Mudie's as unfit for any one's pe- 
rusal. The fiat of Mr. W. H. Smith excluded 
it from all the news- stalls. Mr. Moore was 
banned and badgered by the unco' guid, and 
even by many who made no special claim to 
virtue. To-day he is spoken of with marked 
respect as a bold, original, and powerful writer 
whose work deserves most serious study; and, 
in fact, his latest volumes come, not from the 
ill-starred press that first exploited him, nor 
from the neutral house that afterwards accept- 
ed books of his ; but they show upon the title- 
page an imprint that bears with it not only re- 
spectability, but distinction. 

Yet Mr. Moore himself has undergone no 
change in any way since the time when he 
was so bitterly denounced ; nor has his theory 
of art been changed. He is quite as pessimis- 
tic as he ever was. His plots reek quite as 
strongly as they ever did of adultery, and drink, 
and despair. Why is he now persona grata to 
the publishers, and the libraries, and the critics? 
The fact is, that the treatment accorded to M. 
Zola and Mr. Vizetelly, and to the George 
Moore of ten years ago, and that which this 
same novelist receives to-day, are not in reality 
symptomatic of British hypocrisy, but rather 



GEORGE MOORE 9 1 

of British inconsistency, an inconsistency that 
comes from jumbHng together two utterly ir- 
reconcilable motives — the artistic motive and 
the motive of morality. At one time the lat- 
ter gets control, and Mr. Moore is damned ; at 
another the artistic sentiment is in the ascend- 
ant, and he is set upon a throne in a sort of 
apotheosis. Now, as a matter of fact, either 
point of view is quite defensible. It hardly 
admits of question that A Mummer s Wife 
and Mike Fletcher — yes, and Esther Waters and 
Celibates — are very far from being the sort of 
reading that one would recommend virginibus 
piierisque. Personally, I do not think their 
tendency to be immoral, but the contrary, be- 
cause they paint vice in such ghastly colors ; 
yet the knowledge of vice which they display 
is hardly edifying. On the other hand, it is 
quite as fair to judge them wholly on their 
literary merits, and thus to speak of them in 
the very warmest terms of praise. In Eng- 
land, however, the motive of morality is for- 
ever clashing with the purely artistic instinct, 
thus leading in practice to the paradoxical re- 
sult described above. 

Mr. Moore is unique among English writers 
of to-day. An Irishman by birth, he received 
his training in Paris, where he lived so long as 



92 GEORGE MOORE 

almost to lose the idiomatic command of his 
mother-tongue, a fact recorded by himself in 
his interesting Confessions of a Young Man; 
and his first novel, a story of Ireland under the 
Land League, was actually written and pub- 
lished in French. Returning to England, how- 
ever, he recovered his use of literary English, 
and after a series of somewhat desultory ex- 
periments, began to contribute regularly to the 
pages of those ephemeral publications that are 
seldom seen outside of London, and that in 
London find their limited circulation within 
the borders of literary and artistic Bohemia. 
Mr. Moore wrote much and often — dramatic 
criticisms, art criticism, literary criticism — de- 
veloping a style and an intellectual purpose 
that have become very distinctive in his later 
and more ambitious work. He put forth also 
several fugitive attempts at fiction, until at 
last he gave to the world a novel which still 
remains the best known as well as the most 
striking thing that he has done. 

A Mummer s Wife narrates the story of a 
woman of the lower middle class, one reared 
in the strictest, narrowest fashion known to 
the English of the provincial towns, but one 
whose temperament is crossed by sensuous 
impulses that lie dormant in her early life, be- 



GEORGE MOORE 93 

cause nothing has occurred as yet to waken 
them. So she lives on with her feeble, asth- 
matic husband, keeping his shop for him and 
eking out their income by her needle. She is 
a woman of much physical attractiveness, and 
when, one day, the manager of a travelling 
dramatic troupe becomes a lodger in the house, 
he immediately lays siege to her, and with 
ultimate success; so that she leaves her hus- 
band for her lover and with him enters on a 
life whose novel freedom and tawdry Bohemi- 
anism fascinate her, especially when she finally 
becomes herself a player and enters fully into 
the nomadic, happy-go-lucky, lawless existence 
of her new companions. The story that fol- 
lows is a curious study of the general deterio- 
ration of her character — of a pathetic and 
unceasing struggle between the enduring con- 
straint of heredity and of her early training, 
and the powerful influences with which her 
new environment appeals to those subtly in- 
terwoven traits that thrill her whole being in 
answer to their urgings. She is line dine d^s- 
oricntcc, distracted, unbalanced ; and the ex- 
position of the process by which she slowly 
sinks to the very lowest depths of degrada- 
tion is powerful, and pitiless, and searching. 
With one exception Mr. Moore has never done 



94 GEORGE MOORE 

such perfect character-drawing as in this book, 
which contains a dozen men and women who 
are marvellously realized. Dick Lennox, the 
actor-lover, fat, vulgar, " sensual as a mutton- 
chop," absolutely devoid of sentiment, yet ab- 
solutely honest, and good-natured to the verge 
of weakness, is a remarkable study, and so is 
Kate herself in every stage of her career, from 
the first pages of the book, where we find her 
primly waiting in the shop, to the crisis, where 
at the death of her infant she takes to drink, 
and at the end, where she is wallowing in the 
gutters, wrecked in hope, enfeebled in intellect, 
and lost to shame. Intensely vivid is the mi- 
nutely curious picture of the life of the stroll- 
ing players, their intrigues, their quarrels, their 
shady, shifty, hand-to-mouth devices, their con- 
ceit, their comradeship, their paltry triumphs, 
and their squalid troubles. No less remarkable 
is the carefully drawn study of the develop- 
ment of the drink-habit in a woman who fights 
against it and endeavors to conceal its prog- 
ress with all the subtlety of deceit of which 
the drunkard and the opium-eater alone are 
capable. 

The vogue of A Miumncr s Wife, which, 
thanks partly to the advertising given it by 
those who tried to secure its practical sup- 



GEORGE MOORE 95 

pression, passed to its fourteenth edition in 
the first year of its publication, won for Mr. 
Moore's succeeding novels an instant hearing. 
And they well deserved it ; for, in spite of many 
and obvious defects and inequalities, they were 
original and strong, and they represented be- 
sides a particular literary gen7-c that had had 
as yet no representative in English. Of these 
further works A JModcrn Lover is a novel of 
the world of art, its central figure being one 
of those effeminate, corrupt, deceitful natures 
so frequently found in men who follow the 
artistic career, and who for some not very 
obvious reason exercise a curious fascination 
upon women. Seymour, the artist in ques- 
tion, is wholly base, yet through his power over 
women, whom he systematically uses and de- 
ceives, he makes his way successfully from 
poverty to social and professional success. 
Vain Fortitnc^ the least interesting of anything 
that Mr. Moore has done, is a study of femi- 
nine jealousy, skilfully conceived and firmly 
drawn, but rather slight and lacking in per- 
spective. A Drama in Muslin was written as 
an attempt to draw the modern girl as shown 
in three distinct and different types, so that in 
this book men play no very important part; 
but as a study in temperament the attempt 



96 GEORGE MOORE 

is scarcely a success. One gets an impression 
of nothing very characteristic, and certainly of 
nothing that may be taken as being really 
typical. Yet in another way the book is one 
of some importance. The scene is laid in 
Ireland, and the life depicted is that of the 
"Castle set" — the half- impoverished gentry 
and those who wish to be considered as among 
the gentry. To the future social historian of 
Britain this novel may well prove an inter- 
esting document ; for Mr. Moore knows his 
ground most thoroughly, and he has caught 
to perfection the squalid, frowzy setting and 
the scarcely subdued vulgarity of that mori- 
bund society which in another generation will 
be happily extinct. 

As A DravLa in Muslin was written to de- 
scribe the typical young woman, Mike Fletcher 
— a novel, by the way, whose title is said to 
have very materially hurt its sale — embodies 
Mr. Moore's conception of the men who are 
typical of our time. One would be very sor- 
ry, however, to accept the personages of this 
book as being any but sporadic specimens. 
At the most they can only typify the London 
" bounder " in several of his most unpleasant 
phases ; nor have they any real importance to 
readers whose lives are lived a hundred miles 



GEORGE MOORE 97 

from Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus 
and the Strand. They are all more or less 
young, they are chiefly bachelors living in 
chambers in the Temple, or in contiguous 
lodgings. Some of them are journalists and 
some are artists and some are merely men- 
about-town ; but all of them alike devote their 
days and nights to wine and women and riot 
and brawling, with intervals of erotic verse- 
writing, and rather incoherent philosophical 
discussions punctuated with stupid jokes and 
ribald stories. Mike Fletcher himself, the un- 
savory hero of the book, who is described in 
its pages b}'' one of his admirers as a "toff," 
is a thorough-going cad, the son of an Irish 
peasant, who gets on after a fashion by a com- 
bination of impudence and subserviency, and 
whose success with women of every class is as 
great as that of Seymour in A Modern Lover. 
But Mike Fletcher, after inheriting a fortune 
from one of these impressionable beings and 
after having exhausted every possible form of 
what he views as pleasure, is haunted by a 
Weltschmerz so profound and so unconquer- 
able that in the end he takes his own life 
after a most ghastly scene of hopeless, horrify- 
ing self-communion. The book is in a way a 
powerful one, and some of its episodes are 
7 



98 GEORGE MOORE 

very striking ; but in writing it Mr. Moore did 
not have all of his material quite thoroughly 
in hand. The story is not compact, but is too 
often vague ; and he resorts now and then 
to improbabilities, as when he makes Mike 
Fletcher rush off to the desert in a moment 
of boredom and become the chosen friend of 
an Arab chief among the Bedawin — an episode 
that is most incongruous and bizarre. There is 
another special criticism to be made. In near- 
ly every book that he has written the author is 
very free with casual allusions to persons and 
things that presuppose a knowledge on the 
reader's part of all his other books; but in 
Mike Fletcher he refers to incidents which even 
to one who remembers every line that he 
has written are wholly unintelligible ; so that 
more than once a particularly exasperating 
vagueness settles down upon the mind to be- 
fog the interest and destroy the continuity of 
the story. 

Esther Waters was the first novel of Mr. 
Moore's to be reprinted in the United States, 
and it is still the only one by which in this 
country he is generally known. It is inferior 
to A Mummer s Wife, and, as a whole, to A 
Modern Lover and Mike Fletcher; but the first 
half of it contains some of the very best of all 



GEORGE MOORE 99 

its author's work. It tells the story of an Eng- 
lish servant-maid, and it is written as a human 
document illustrative of the life, the ethics, 
and the average experiences of the class to 
which Esther herself belongs. Esther Waters 
goes out to service in the family of a country 
gentleman ; she is betrayed by one of the 
grooms, is turned out of her place, and is 
thrown upon her own resources. The por- 
tions of the book which tell of her life imme- 
diately before the birth of her child, of her 
hospital experiences, and of the struggle for 
a livelihood that follows, are very powerfully 
written. Mr. Moore succeeds here, as he has 
nowhere else so perfectly succeeded, in touch- 
ing the sources of sympathy and of pity. One 
reads these pages with an emotion that is almost 
irresistible, and that is the very strongest tribute 
to their author's grasp on life. But after that 
point in the story is reached where Esther's 
groom returns and marries her, and they settle 
down to the keeping of a " pub," and, on the 
husband's part, to the experiences of a typical 
British book-maker, the intensity of the inter- 
est wanes rapidly. The novel then becomes 
too obviously a Tcndcnzronian, after the fash- 
ion of Zola's L Argent, and is in its too appar- 
ent purpose almost a tract against the universal 



lOO GEORGE MOORE 

British vice of betting. The low life which Mr. 
Moore here depicts is given with extraordi- 
nary accuracy of detail, and the picture is of 
much sociological interest, but it is always 
borne in upon the reader that the facts have 
been " got up " for the occasion, and, unlike M. 
Zola in his similar performances, Mr. Moore 
has not the heat and glow of a great creative 
imagination to fuse his raw material into a 
dramatically satisfying whole. 

A book of his called Celibates, which appear- 
ed in 1895, contains three stories, two of them 
very short and comparatively unimportant, 
though striking and original ; but the third, 
which is almost long enough to be called a 
novel, is a very memorable piece of work. I 
think it not only the most remarkable thing 
that Mr. Moore has ever done, but as a piece 
of minute observation and psychological analy- 
sis, one of the most extraordinary things in all 
modern literature. It is entitled Mildred Law- 
son, and, summarized briefly, is the story of a 
young Englishwoman reared among common- 
place and comfortable surroundings, but filled 
with a belief that life has some higher mission 
for her than house-keeping and the bearing 
of children. Having some money of her own, 
she takes up painting, studies in London, hires 



GEORGE MOORE lOI 

an apartment in Paris, becomes a Bohemian of 
the extreme type, and flits about in a society 
that is frankly beyond the pale of decency. 
Yet because of her own coldness of tempera- 
ment and her perpetual thought of self, she 
remains physically pure, and we leave her toss- 
ing about upon her bed with the cry, " Give 
me a passion for God or man, but give me a 
passion ! I cannot live without one !" 

There is probably no living writer in any 
language who could have drawn this curious- 
ly subtle character as Mr. Moore has drawn it, 
with a feeling for the most evanescent nuances 
of temperament and a knowledge of certain 
phases and types that is absolutely marvel- 
lous. This story, in fact, should properly rank 
its author with the greatest masters of fiction 
— with Stendhal and Balzac and Flaubert and 
Thackeray ; yet it will not do so, and for a very 
obvious reason. When one thinks of it, why 
does it happen that the epoch-making novel- 
ists just named have not only won an enduring 
artistic success, but what may be called a pop- 
ular success as well, so that their names and 
their works alike are familiar to all cultivated 
men and women ? It is not merely because of 
their genius and their profound knowledge of 
life, their subtlety and the perfection of their 



I02 GEORGE MOORE 

literary methods. It is first of all because they 
have exercised these gifts and qualities in a field 
that is familiar to all who read. The types 
they draw are, in general, the types that the 
most casual person can recognize and judge. 
Every man of the world has, in his own ex- 
perience, met Major Pendennis and Costigan 
and Colonel Newcome. Becky Sharp has flit- 
ted across the life of every one who lives in 
the greater world. The tragedy of Pere Go- 
riot is enacted daily before the eyes of all of 
us. Every provincial town contains an Emma 
Bovary. Therefore, when these and others of 
their general ubiquity appear in the pages of 
a master, the perfect truth of the portraiture 
is at once perceived by all, and the achieve- 
ment is hailed with universal pleasure and ap- 
plause. But in drawing Mildred Lawson, Mr. 
Moore has deliberately fixed upon a type which 
is not a common one as yet, though it will 
grow commoner, I think, as society develops 
on its present lines. It is a type that even 
men of wide experience may not have hap- 
pened to encounter; and so, in reading this 
most subtle study, they may view it as a pure 
invention of the novelist, wonderfully consist- 
ent and impressive to be sure, but one that 
does not quite belong to actual life. They will 



GEORGE MOORE IO3 

style it an abstraction, a mere personification 
of certain intellectual and moral qualities, the 
work of a literary Frankenstein, curious and 
masterly, but on the whole unreal. And this 
is the penalty which Mr. Moore must pay for 
his daring and for his devotion to what he feels 
to be the truth; for the type does actually ex- 
ist, and with those who know it, its complexity 
and its psychological abnormality, which partly 
elude and partly appall the analyst, can only 
heighten the unqualified amazement that is 
the one appropriate tribute to Mr, Moore's al- 
most incredible success. 

The rarity of the type drawn in Mildred 
Lawson is due to the fact that she combines so 
many different qualities, as to become a com- 
plex and not even a fairly simple character. 
One sees in these days many women who are 
at war with their environment and galled by 
conventionality, who have educated themselves 
beyond the control of every-day principles of 
conduct, and who are bent upon " living their 
own life," as the slang of the hour describes it. 
One sees many women, also, of great clever- 
ness and imagination and subtlety ; and of 
course one meets women of beauty and fas- 
cination and refinement. Nor is there any 
dearth of women who are introspective and 



I04 GEORGE MOORE 

self-analytical to the point of morbidity, and 
who in consequence are selfish in the intellect- 
ual as well as in the moral sense of that com- 
prehensive word. But what one very seldom 
sees is a woman who combines all of these 
qualities and attributes — who is beautiful, ac- 
complished, and fascinating, imaginative and 
intellectual, absolutely unfettered by the tra- 
ditional limitations that have their root in cen- 
turies of social conventions, and yet so self- 
centred and acutely conscious of self as to 
find in this one trait the check upon conduct 
as well as upon achievement which in others 
of her sex arises from the thought of extra- 
neous opinion. Now Mildred Lawson is the 
embodiment of all these characteristics ; and 
to one who knows her type in life, the study 
that Mr. Moore has given of her is, down to 
its very last and subtlest tint, a masterpiece. 

At the time when his book first appeared I 
said, in writing of the character of Mildred 
Lawson, that it suggests a blend of Becky 
Sharp and Blanche Amory ; but such a gen- 
eralization is altogether crude and superficial. 
Beside Mildred Lawson, Becky Sharp is com- 
monplace, and Blanche Amory is a bit of rather 
vulgar affectation. Mildred Lawson's domi- 
nant traits are curiosity and imagination. She 



GEORGE MOORE I05 

wishes to know every phase of life, to experi- 
ence everything, to feel every passion, every 
emotion. Her imaginative mind shows her in 
anticipation wonderful things — the pleasure 
that comes from novelty, from achievement, 
from love, from passion. She figures it all to 
herself beforehand and thrills at the promise 
of it all. But the very intensity of the antic- 
ipation makes the reality when it approaches 
seem poor ; it is, after all, not what she hoped 
for, and she draws back from it with a kind 
of shrinking distaste. She has divined what 
ought to be the emotion for each phase of ex- 
perience, and at the critical moment she falls 
to analyzing the emotion until it vanishes and 
she is disillusioned. It is the cult of self, and 
it brings with it a fatal slavery. Even when 
tragedy enters into her immediate life she 
cannot suffer; she can only wonder why she 
does not feel what she knows she ought to 
feel. There is a conflict of thought and mo- 
tive at every moment. A young artist who 
had loved her, and for whom she had felt a 
sort of patronizing fondness, sends for her as 
he is dying : 

" A close observer might have noticed that the ex- 
pression on Mildred's face changed a little. ' He is 
dying for me,' she thought. And, as in a ray of sun- 



Io6 GEORGE MOORE 

light, she basked for a moment in a little glow of self- 
satisfaction. Then almost angrily she defended her- 
self agamst herself. She was not responsible for so 
casual a thought ; the greatest saint might be a victim 
of a wandering thought. She was, of course, glad that 
he liked her, but she was sorry that she caused him 
suffering. He must have suffered. Men will sacrifice 
anything to their passions. . , . They had had very 
pleasant times together — in this very gallery. , . . 
Suddenly her thoughts became clear and she heard 
these words as if they had been read to her: ' Lots of 
men have killed themselves for women, but to die of 
a broken heart proves a great deal more. Few women 
have inspired such a love as that.' " 

When her own brother dies she is overcome 
with a desire to weep, but she first carefully 
takes off her gown lest she should spoil it in 
abandoning herself to grief. Then she wonders 
whether that was really her reason, after all. 
Her love affairs were quite as fully mingled 
with doubts and shrinkings and hesitations. 
She has no principle ; the question of morality 
does not enter her mind. She is longing for 
the thrill of passion. It will be a new expe- 
rience. She is ready for it. So at Barbizon, 
where she goes to paint, she meets in that 
beautiful spot, amid the scent of flowers and 
the dewy dusk of the great forest, an English 
painter — a frank sensualist, a man of physical 



GEORGE MOORE 107 

charm and with the added attractions of talent 
and fame. They roam the forest together. She 
thinks of how she longs for him. She would like 
to take him in her arms and kiss him. When 
they reach the very heart of the dim forest, 
with its endless billows of dark-green foliage 
and its mysterious murmurings instinct with 
nature, she wonders whether he will kiss 
her, whether he will take her hand and tell 
her how he loves her. But he does not un- 
derstand her, though he partly divines her 
thought. Her curious uncertainty, that stifles 
desire at the very moment when promise ap- 
proaches fulfilment, makes her manner half- 
repellent. Yet the two go on together with a 
curious frankness. They discuss Morton's for- 
mer mistresses ; they stick at nothing in word 
and phrase — but Mildred still shrinks from the 
critical step. She cannot feel the self-abandon- 
ment, the sublime unconsciousness that marks 
the triumph of love. And so the story is un- 
folded. She longs to do something really 
great, but her talent is not adequate for that, 
and she cares for nothing that is less than 
great. She longs for love, but her heart is 
cold and her emotions dulled. She fascinates 
others; she is brilliant, good-natured in a way, 
with that careless cood-nature which is often 



I08 GEORGE MOORE 

the very refinement of cruelty in that it is at 
bottom quite indifferent ; and she dissects and 
vivisects herself at every turn until she gets at 
last a horrible understanding of her own real 
nature. 

" Self had been her ruin ; she had never been able 
to get away from self ; no, not for a single moment of 
her life. All her love-stories had been ruined and 
disfigured by self-assertion — not a great, unconscious 
self, in other words, an instinct, but an extremely con- 
scious, irritable, mean, and unworthy self. She knew 
it all ; she was not deceived. She could no more 
cheat herself than she could change herself ; that 
wretched self was as present in her at this moment as 
it had ever been, and knowledge of her fault helped 
her nothing in its correction. She could not change 
herself ; she would have to bear the burden of herself 
to the end." 

The picture is astonishing ; and one despairs 
in attempting to convey to those who have 
not read the book even a faint conception of 
the startling power of analysis which it every- 
where displays. 

It has been said above that Mr. Moore has 
given to English literature an entirely new 
genre, and this is true ; for though, after he re- 
turned to England, he won back his English 
style, he has never separated himself from the 



GEORGE MOORE IO9 

French school of literary art in which he re- 
ceived his earliest training; and he is to-day to 
be grouped, not with Hardy and Hope and 
Besant, but with far greater artists than even 
the first of these — with Guy de Maupassant 
and Zola and J. K. Huysmans. He is, in fact, 
the only writer of English who exemplifies the 
whole manner and spirit of the Realists. In 
everything but his language he is French, and 
not only French but Parisian. His models, 
his standards, his whole technique he finds 
among the writers of France ; and one is not 
surprised on learning that it was he who first 
made known to the English the works of Ver- 
laine and Rimbaud and Jules Laforge. There 
is not a single one of his longer novels that 
is not demonstrably inspired or sensibly in- 
fluenced by some great French masterpiece. 
The seduction of Kate Lennox, in A Miim- 
mers Wife, and her gradual degradation 
through drink, must be regarded as a reiMnis- 
cence of the story of Gervaise in L Assominoir, 
Mike Fletcher, who takes money from women 
and rises by their favor from back-alley journal- 
ism to fortune, is only an English (or Irish) 
replica of Georges Duroy in Bel- Ami. The 
story o^ Esther Waters is an evident borrowing 
from the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, with 



no GEORGE MOORE 

a greater minuteness of obstetrical description. 
In fact, while Mr. Moore is not a copyist, he is 
so saturated with the theories of the Realistic 
School as to make it impossible for him to 
avoid the reproduction of their themes. 

Nor is it merely in his themes that he recalls 
his Gallic masters. The pessimism of his writ- 
ings makes him still more closely kin to them ; 
and for this his Celtic origin is undoubtedly 
responsible, since the pessimism of the Celt is 
something to which the Anglo-Saxon can never 
by any possibility attain. The Celt, whether 
he be Irish or French, is always a creature of 
extremes. Light-hearted with a delightful joy- 
ousness and frivolity, he is, in his other mood, 
hopeless with an abysmal misery. The Anglo- 
Saxon, on the other hand, though he takes his 
pleasure sadly, takes his sorrow hopefully, and 
has an element of sturdy resistance in his nature 
that defies destiny and smites the inevitable in 
the face. The gloom of the Anglo-Saxon is a 
melancholy half-light; the gloom of the Celt 
is the blackness that presses on the eye-balls 
like a physical weight, and plunges the very 
soul into infinite despair. Mr. Hardy, for in- 
stance, gives us a fine expression of Anglo- 
Saxon pessimism. Things are often ordered 
for the very worst in this world ; but he accepts 



GEORGE MOORE III 

the worst, and can still perceive the humor that 
forever gleams amid the irony of fate. But the 
pessimism of a Maupassant is a grim, intense, 
and all- including monotony of horror that 
taints and corrodes like a mordant acid. And 
so nothing in all literature is more hideous 
than the last twenty pages of Mike Fletcher, 
after reading which one feels for the moment 
that life itself is a loathsome thing, pregnant 
with shame and nameless evil. 

How purely French is Mr. Moore's literary 
method can perhaps best be seen in what he 
has written as a critic of literature and art. 
To the general reading public his most impor- 
tant book of criticism is the one which in form 
is nearest akin to the conventional volume of 
essays, such as American and English writers 
put forth from time to time. Yet it is not 
in Impressions and Opinions that one finds the 
true George Moore, but in a curious and fas- 
cinating little volume entitled Tlie Confessions 
of a Yonng Man, put forth several years ago, 
and reprinted in this country, where it sloVvly 
passed into a second edition. This book, which 
is unique in English literature, is nominally the 
autobiography of one Edward Dayne ; but it 
may very fairly be regarded as containing a 
suggestion, and something more than a suggest- 



GEORGE MOORE 



ion, of the facts of Mr. Moore's own personal 
history. The thread of story, however, is a 
very slight one, and is broken and intercalat- 
ed with disconnected and apparently irrelevant 
paragraphs that touch upon the most diverse 
questions of art, literature, and morals. Thus, 
a propos of nothing in particular, the author 
will drop the narrative of Dayne's financial 
troubles, or of his vie dc BoJitme, to express a 
terse judgment on the Symbolists, or on the 
impossibility of marriage among enlightened 
persons, or on the artistic value of the music- 
hall, or on the respective merits of the eigh- 
teenth-century tavern and the nineteenth-cen- 
tury club ; or he will pause to discourse with 
curious psychological subtlety on la femme de 
trcntc ans, and then suddenly slip back into 
the narration that he has temporarily put 
aside. The lack of form in all this is, to a 
conventionally Anglo-Saxon reader, exasperat- 
ing and eccentric; to others it is simply piq- 
uant ; but in reality it is part of a perfectly 
consistent design in that it gives us a picture 
of mentality, of an intellectual and aesthetic 
condition, and thus fits in perfectly with the 
synchronous picture of a human life. In this, 
moreover, Mr. Moore is not violating literary 
precedent — he is following it ; only the model 



GEORGE MOORE II3 

that he has before him is French, not English. 
It is as old as Jean Paul ; it is as new as Mau- 
rice Barres ; and, in fact, it is probably the 
curious Ennevii dcs Lois of Barres that Mr. 
Moore is consciously imitating in his plan, al- 
though he does not specifically mention that 
odd and brilliant writer. And the opinions 
themselves are strikingly original — audacious, 
independent, perverse, absolutely un-Enghsh, 
wholly French. Take this, for example : 

" I am sick of synthetical art ; we want observation 
direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with 
is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, 
the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit 
that it is somewhat stereotyped. What does this mat- 
ter ? What is more stereotyped than Japanese art .-* 
But that does not prevent it from being always beau- 
tiful." 

This is thinking aloud. Then take the fol- 
lowing : 

" How to be happy ! — not to read Baudelaire and 
Verlaine, not to enter the ' Nouvelle Athenes,' unless 
perhaps to play dominos like the bourgeois over 
there, not to do anything that would awake a too in- 
tense consciousness of life — to live in a sleepy coun- 
try-side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife 
and children, to chatter quietly every evening over 
the details of existence. We must have the azaleas 



114 GEORGE MOORE 

out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are de- 
voured by insects ; the tame rook has flown away ; 
mother lost her prayer-book coming from church; 
she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do 
peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very 
nearly happy — and to think there are people who 
would educate, who would draw these people out of 
the calm satisfaction of their instincts and give them 
passions. The philanthropist is the Nero of modern 
times." 

Here is a bit of personal feeling that is as 
French as though written by a Frenchman : 

" The years the most impressionable, from twenty 
to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest 
awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, 
had spent in France, not among English residents, but 
among that which is the quintessence of the nation ; 
I, not an indiflferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striv- 
ing heart and soul to identify himself with his environ- 
ment, to shake himself free from race and language, 
and to recreate himself, as it were, in the womb of a 
new nationality, assuming its ideals, its morals, and 
its modes of thought ; and I had succeeded strangely 
well, and when I returned home England was a new 
country to me ; I had, as it were, forgotten every- 
thing. Every aspect of street and suburban garden 
was new to me; of the manner of life of Londoners 
I knew nothing. This sounds incredible; but it is 
so. I saw, but I could realize nothing. I went into a 
drawing-room, but everything seemed far away — a 
dream, a presentment, nothing more ; I was in touch 



GEORGE MOORE II5 

with nothing ; of the thoughts and feelings of those I 
met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympa- 
thize with them ; an Englishman was at that time as 
much out of my mental reach as an Esquimau would 
be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I 
will take this opportunity to note my observation, for 
I am not aware that any one else has observed that 
the difference between the two races is found in the 
men, not in the women. French and English women 
are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from 
which they see life is the same, the same thoughts in- 
terest and amuse them ; but the attitude of a French- 
man's mind is absolutely opposed to that of an Eng- 
lishman ; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, 
two animals different in color, form, and tempera- 
ment — two ideas destined to remain irrevocably sep- 
arate and distinct." 

Mr. Moore has something to say of con- 
temporary English literature. Here are some 
rather curious bits. The first has to do with 
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. 

" I will state frankly that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never 
wrote a line that failed to delight me; but he never 
wrote a book. ... I think of Mr. Stevenson as a con- 
sumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with 
pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate -glass 
window and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with 
a diamond pencil. ... I do not care to speak of great 
ideas, for I am unable to see how an idea can exist, 
at all events can be great, out of language ; an allu- 
sion to Mr. Stevenson's verbal expression will perhaps 



Il6 GEORGE MOORE 

make my meaning clear. His periods are fresh and 
bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect realizations 
of their sense ; in reading you often think that never 
before was such definiteness united to such poetry of 
expression ; every page and every sentence rings of 
its individuality. Mr. Stevenson's style is over-smart — • 
well dressed, shall I say? — like a young man walking 
in the Burlington Arcade. Yes, I will say so ; but, I 
will add, the most gentlemanly young man that ever 
walked on the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is com- 
petent to understand any thought that might be pre- 
sented to him ; but if he were to use it, it would in- 
stantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and 
graceful ; and it would lose all its original richness 
and harmony. It is not Mr. Stevenson's brain that 
prevents him from being a thinker, but his style." 

And this is what he has to say of Mr. George 
Meredith : 

" ' When we have translated half of Mr. Meredith's 
utterances into possible human speech, then we can 
enjoy him,' says the Pall Mall Gazette. We take our 
pleasures differently ; mine are spontaneous, and I 
know nothing about translating the rank smell of a 
nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and than enjoy- 
ing it. 

" Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill- 
balanced, and out of tune. What remains } A cer- 
tain lustiness. You have seen a big man with square 
shoulders and a small head pushing about in a crowd ; 
he shouts and works his arms ; he seems to be doing 
a great deal ; in reality, he is doing nothing. So Mr. 



GEORGE MOORE II7 

Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of 
him as an artist. His habit is not slatternly, like those 
of such literary hodmen as Mr. David Christie Mur- 
ray, Mr. Besant, Mr. Buchanan. There is no trace of 
the crowd about him. I do not question his right of 
place. I am out of sympathy with him — that is all ; 
and I regret that it should be so, for he is one whose 
love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism ; 
and if I may praise it for naught else, I can praise it 
for this." 

What he says of Mr. Hardy is particularly 
interesting, for it shows what I have always 
said, that, with all Mr. Hardy's pessimism and 
with all his frankness on certain social ques- 
tions, he is still essentially Anglo-Saxon, and 
is therefore, from the French point of view, 
likely to be misjudged and misunderstood. 

" His work is what dramatic critics would call good, 
honest, straightforward work. It is unillumined by 
a ray of genius ; it is slow and somewhat sodden. It 
reminds me of an excellent family coach — one of the 
old sort — hung on C-springs, a fat coachman on the 
box, and a footman whose livery was made for his 
predecessor. In criticising Mr. Meredith I was out of 
sympathy with my author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled ; 
but with Mr. Hardy I am on quite different terms. I 
am as familiar with him as with the old pair of trou- 
sers I put on when I sit down to write. I know all 
about his aims, his methods. I know what has been 
done in that line, and what can be done." 



Il8 GEORGE MOORE 

The following dictum is not wholly, perhaps, 
unfair to Mr. Henry James, but it is decidedly 
unjust to Mr. Hovvells: 

" What Mr. James wants to do is what he does. I 
will admit that an artist may be great and limited ; by- 
one word he may light up an abyss of soul ; but there 
must be this one magical and unique word. Shake- 
speare gives us the word ; Balzac sometimes, after pages 
of vain striving, gives us the word ; Tourguenieff gives 
it with miraculous certainty ; but Henry James, no. A 
hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is 
one long flutter near to the one magical and unique 
word, but the word is not spoken ; and for want of 
the word his characters are never resolved out of the 
haze or nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance 
with them. They pass you in the street, they stop 
and speak to you ; you know how they are dressed ; 
you watch the color of their eyes. ... I have seen a 
good many people I knew. I have observed an atti- 
tude and an earnestness of manner that proved that 
a heart was beating. ... I have read nothing of 
Henry James's that did not suggest the manner of a 
scholar. But why should a scholar limit himself to 
empty and endless sentimentalities .'' I will not taunt 
him with any of the old taunts. Why does he not 
write complicated stories.'' Why does he not com- 
plete his stories? Let all this be waived. I will ask 
him only why he always avoids decisive action .-* Why 
does a woman never say ' I will ' ? Why does a woman 
never leave the house with her lover ? Why does a 
man never kill a man } Why does a man never kill 



GEORGE MOORE I 19 

himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished ? In 
real life, murder, adultery, and suicide are of com- 
mon occurrence ; but Mr. James's people live in a 
calm, sad, and very polite twilight volition. Suicide 
or adultery has happened before the story begins ; 
suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when 
the characters have left the stage ; but bang in front of 
the reader nothing happens. ... In connection with 
Henry James I had often heard the name of W. D. 
Howells. I bought some three or four of his novels. 
I found them pretty, very pretty, but nothing more — 
a sort of Ashby Sterry done into very neat prose. He 
is vulgar, is refined as Henry James ; he is more do- 
mestic ; girls with white dresses and virginal looks, 
languid mammas, mild witticisms, here, there, and 
everywhere ; a couple of young men, one a little cyni- 
cal, the other a little overshadowed by his love ; a 
strong, bearded man of fifty in the background ; in a 
word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly spiced with 
American. Henry James went to France and read 
Tourguenieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and 
read Henry James." 

It is impossible to sum up Mr. Moore as a 
critic in any very satisfactory way. He is 
frankly a decadent, frankly a sensualist, but 
a decadent and a sensualist of the type of 
Huysmans, whom he intensely admires : 

" A page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a 
glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur. . . . 
Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of 



I20 GEORGE MOORE 

Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the 
yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the pas- 
sion of the mural, of the window." 

But Mr. Moore's affinity with Huysmans 
does not go further than a certain sensuous 
sympathy. He could never follow him in 
that curious transformation of which I have 
elsewhere written, because he has never fol- 
lowed him to the full in the unrelieved bru- 
tality that was the essential condition of an 
ultimate reaction. Mr. Moore must remain in- 
tellectually apart from any actual translation 
of thought into action ; he must go on stirred 
by strange thoughts, forever sensitive to the 
subtlest aesthetic influences, but to the very 
last resisting absolutely any impulse towards 
a definite and final rangcuicnt. 

A word must be said of his style and liter- 
ary expression ; and here again the same anal- 
ogies with the French are unmistakable. As 
his critical writing recalls the manner of Barres 
and his associates, so his fiction is in style most 
powerfully dominated by the influence of Zola. 
This likeness is, indeed, the very first that strikes 
the casual reader of his pages. He is Zolaesque 
in his keen perception of the purely physical 
side of every scene, of every episode, and even 
of those situations that are properly and pri- 



GEORGE MOORE 121 

marily psychological. Like Zola, he tries to see 
a sort of harmony between a state of mind and 
its external setting. Like Zola, too, and the 
other naturalistic writers, his sense of smell is 
exceedingly acute, and his odor-scheme is as 
well defined as is the color -scheme of Mr. 
Stephen Crane, and far less fanciful. He 
never spares you even the most nauseous 
osmic detail of the sick-room, of the slum, 
of the stale and stifling boozing-ken. In his 
ballroom scenes, under the fragrance of crush- 
ed and dying flowers and the most exquisite 
perfumes, he will detect and note the scent of 
perspiration, the suggestion of bared necks 
and arms. The escaping gas of the theatre, 
the whiff from the sewer-opening, and the in- 
describable sourness of the drunkard, all run 
through his descriptive passages like a musical 
accompaniment — a ;«^/?/ directed through the 
nostrils to the mind. This is reminiscent of 
Zola, and of Maupassant, the great high-priest 
of the sense of smell; but it is not imitative, 
for it is just as natural to Mr, Moore as it is to 
these great writers, and it is wonderfully effec- 
tive in its psychical results. We get in him, for 
example, not merely the Paris that meets the 
casual eye, but the Paris that is perceptible to 
the nose as well — the bouquet of the boulevard, 



122 GEORGE MOORE 

the blend of leaves and earth, of wet as- 
phalt, of flaring gas and of cookery, suffused 
with the suggestion of wine and cigarette 
smoke, and just a whiff of opoponax and cory- 
lopsis from the perfumed silks and laces that 
brush against us in the gliding throng. To 
read some paragraphs of Celibates gives the 
exiled _/?^;/r/^r a curious reminiscent thrill that 
almost pulses into pain. Yet, though these 
subtle appeals to a sense too greatly scorned 
by the Anglo-Saxon are oftenest made through 
media that offend, it is only fair to say that, 
like Zola, and in a far higher degree, Mr. 
Moore is acutely sensitive to what is beauti- 
ful in nature. Some of his descriptions, 
though nearly always brief, are exquisitely 
realized, and are set in language that en- 
chants the ear, and through the ear the im- 
agination. Take this of the forest at Bar- 
bizon : 

" There was an opening in the trees, and below that 
the dark-green forest waved for miles. It was pleas- 
ant to rest — they were tired. The forest murmured 
like a shell. . . . It extended like a great temple, hush- 
ed in the ritual of the sunset. The light that suffused 
the green leaves overhead glossed the brown leaves 
underfoot, marking the smooth ground as with a 
pattern. And like chapels every dell seemed in the 
tranquil light, and leading from them a labyrinthine 



GEORGE MOORE 123 

architecture without design or end. Mildred's eyes 
wandered from the colonnades to the underwoods. 
She thought of the forest as of a great green prison ; 
and then her soul fled to the scraps of blue that ap- 
peared through the thick leafage, and she longed for 
large spaces of sky, for a view of a plain, for a pine- 
plumed hill-top." 

" The forest murmured like a shell." That 
is one of the most exquisite touches of descrip- 
tion that the English language owns ; and the 
whole passage gives, as no painted picture, 
whether of Cazin or of Harpignies, can ever 
give, the full effect upon the senses of a vast 
forest, of its immensity, of its beauty, and of 
its overpowering oppressiveness. 

Here is Kate Lennox, as we first meet her, 
in A Miunnier s Wife : 

" Nothing was now heard but the methodical click 
of her needle as it struck the head of her thimble, and 
then the long swish of the thread as she drew it 
through the cloth. The lamp at her elbow burned 
steadily, and the glare glanced along her arm as she 
raised it with the large movement of sewing. Wher- 
ever the light touched it her hair was blue, and it en- 
circled, like a piece of rich black velvet, the white but 
tpo prominent temples ; a dark shadow defined the 
fine, straight nose, hinted at a thin indecision of lips, 
whilst a broad touch of white marked the weak but 
not unbeautiful chin. On her knees lay the patch- 



124 GEORGE MOORE 

work, with its jagged edges, and the floor at her feet 
was covered with innumerable scraps, making a red 
and black litter." 

Few Anglo-Saxons ever fully entertain a 
true conception of word-values as the French 
do, and as George Moore has done. That the 
exact word always exists, and that any word 
but the exact word breaks the connection be- 
tween the writer and the reader's minds, is a 
fact of which few English or Americans in 
these slipshod days are cognizant ; but with 
George Moore, half sensitivist and half sen- 
sualist, and fed on Mallarme and Heredia, the 
cult of le mot juste is a passion. What can be 
more perfect as an example of cadenced melo- 
dy than what he has written of Gustave Kahn's 
Iiitcrniede f 

" The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and me- 
chanical after this, so exquisite and evanescent is the 
rhythm, and the intonations come as sweetly and sud- 
denly as a gust of perfume ; it is as the vibration of a 
fairy orchestra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver 
mist ; but the clouds break, and all the enchantment 
of a spring garden appears in a shaft of sudden sun- 
light." 

Our English tongue can get no nearer than it 

has done here to supreme felicity of phrasing. 

As a bit of striking personal description and 



GEORGE MOORE I 25 

as the last of these quotations, I select Moore's 
interesting account of his first meeting with 
Paul Verlaine, recorded in Impressions and 
Opinions : 

" We got into an omnibus, and then we got into a 
tram. Then we took a cab, and I believe we had to 
take another tram. We passed factories and canals, 
and at one moment I thought we were going to take 
the boat. We at last penetrated into a dim and ec- 
centric region which I had never heard of before. We 
traversed curious streets, inhabited apparently by 
people who in dressing never got further than cauii- 
soles and shirt sleeves ; we penetrated into musty- 
smelling and clamorous court-yards, in which lingered 
Balzacian co7icierges ; we climbed slippery staircases 
upon which doors stood wide open, emitting odors 
and permitting occasional views of domestic life — a 
man in his shirt hammering a boot, a woman, presum- 
ably a mother, wiping a baby. ... In a dark corner, 
at the end of a narrow passage situated at the top of 
the last flight of stairs, we discovered a door. We 
knocked. A voice made itself heard. We entered 
and saw Verlaine. The terrible forehead, bald and 
prominent, was half covered by a filthy nightcap, and 
a night-shirt full of the grease of the bed covered his 
shoulders ; a stained and discolored pair of trousers 
were hitched up somehow about his waist. He was 
drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre. He told us 
that he had just come out of the hospital ; that his leg 
was better, but it still gave him a great deal of pain. 
He pointed to it. We looked away. 



120 GEORGE MOORE 

"He said he was writing the sonnet, and promised 
that we should have it on the morrow. Then, in the 
grossest language, he told us of the abominations he 
had included in the sonnet ; and seeing that our visit 
would prove neither pleasant nor profitable, we took 
our leave as soon as we could." 

It remains only to consider what appears 
to be the most serious and constantly recur- 
ring limitation upon Mr. Moore's extraordinary' 
power as a delineator of contemporary life and 
manners. With all his acuteness of observa- 
tion, with all his sureness of touch, with all his 
insight and experience, it is impossible to over- 
look the very important fact that this insight 
and experience are very closely circumscribed 
by what one can only call his ignorance of the 
brighter side of the social world. Mr. Moore's 
social attitude is that of a man who has lived 
in clubs and mingled with men of the world 
only in those hours which they give to what is 
usually known as pleasure. His views are the 
sort of views that one may always hear set 
forth in the club smoking-room, and his 
notion of domestic life is the notion formed 
by one who takes all this cynicism literally 
and as representing a permanent and predom- 
inant state of mind. But every one of large 
experience knows how utterly misleading all 



GEORGE MOORE 12/ 

this is, especially when noted among men of 
our own race. That the cynic of the smok- 
ing-room will, over his petit vcrre and a good 
cigar, tell improper little stories of the world 
in which he lives, that he gibes at marriage, 
that he professes to suspect the virtue of all 
women, that he airs theories which are at vari- 
ance with all the traditions of his people — this 
means absolutely less than nothing in a vast 
majority of instances. It is the idle talk of men 
who are in reality tender-hearted, loyal, devot- 
ed, reverent, and true ; and when any one, like 
Mr. Moore, constructs for himself a society 
upon the basis of these post-cenatory conver- 
sations he is mistaking an idle phase for a per- 
manent condition. Now the social world that 
one discovers in Mr. Moore's novels is essen- 
tially a mirage of the clubs, and not a thing of 
which he has a first-hand knowledge. A very 
brilliant woman of my acquaintance, and one 
whose invincible determination not to write 
inflicts a real loss on English literature, has ex- 
pressed this thought in a figurative sort of way. 
" It is a pity," she said, after reading one of his 
novels, " that George Moore is not sometimes 
willing to drink a cup of tea in the afternoon." 
But he never is ; and brandy-and-soda is about 
the only beverage suggested by his writing. 



128 GEORGE MOORE 

This would be no defect at all if he were 
strictly to confine himself to the actual corner 
of the world which he knows so well. The in- 
nermost recesses of Bohemia, the sweltering 
slum, the race -course, the public -house, the 
shop, the atelier, the club — here he is quite su- 
preme, a master of detail, a rhyparographer as 
faithful as Eumachus or the Flemish painters. 
But he is not content with this. In A Modern 
Lover and A Drama in Muslin and Mike Fletcher 
he tries to lead us elsewhere and to show us the 
English home, the country-side, the men and 
women who live far from Curzon Street and 
who know not Leicester Square or the " Em- 
pire." And then he fails, and fails in a way 
that not only disappoints but utterly repels; 
for here in the quiet nooks and in an atmos- 
phere of tranquillity and peace he shows us 
still the rakes and bullies, the immodest wom- 
en, the intrigue, and the assignation. The 
fragrance of the hedgerows is tainted by patch- 
ouly and by chypre ; and the heavy opium- 
charged scent of the Egyptian cigarette comes 
to our nostrils in the quiet countr}/ lanes. To 
read some of these pages is like witnessing the 
danse dit ventre performed around a May-pole. 
It is false ; it is monstrous ; it is actually loath- 
some. 



GEORGE MOORE I29 

The club smoking-room is suggested also by 
the language in which Mr. Moore has set down 
much of what he writes. One does not mind his 
coarseness merely because it is coarse, but be- 
cause of its frequent inappropriateness, be- 
cause he is himself quite conscious of his 
offence, and because it is tainted by an almost 
omnipresent suggestion of vulgarity. He has 
some compunction himself on this score, but 
he drugs his literary conscience with the quite 
untenable belief that he is representing a 
genuine reversion to the freer speech of Field- 
ing and of Smollett ; whereas Fielding and 
Smollett, while often coarse, were never vulgar. 
They used the language and the phrases of 
their day with simplicity and complete uncon- 
sciousness ; while Mr. Moore, with other stand- 
ards and in a modern age, is forcing a note, 
and a very false one, in his effort to produce 
what at its best is but a pure anachronism. 

But this defect of his goes e^ven deeper 
down ; and one must frankly say that the 
source of his vulgarity is more than superficial 
and comes from something more than a mis- 
taken choice of models. It is far more funda- 
rrtental, for it colors his whole view of human 
life and makes this in its last analysis the life 
of swine and apes. His revelry is not the care- 
9 



I30 



GEORGE MOORE 



less revelry of youth, soon set aside for the 
soberer duties of maturity ; it is studied sen- 
sualism reduced to a science whose joyless- 
ness is as striking as its depravity. It has no 
mirth, no spontaneity; its record gives us only 
the impression of jaded senses frantically seek- 
ing some new stimulant, loud, mirthless laugh- 
ter, and the sodden discontent that sits amid 
the stale odors of the feast in the gray hours 
of the morning, when the bloodshot eye and 
the twitching face look spectral in the ghastly 
light of dawn. 

And the persons whom he draws for us are 
fit for such a life as he describes. His women 
are of two set types. One is the bold-eyed, full- 
lipped woman whose person exhales a subtle 
suggestion of sensuality, and who is ever seek- 
ing a seducer. From the young girl in the con- 
vent-school to the matron in the ball-room, 
this is the type that Mr. Moore again and 
again is meeting and describing with a strange 
power of erotic suggestion, and a thorough dis- 
belief in the endurance of virtue for any longer 
time than that required to furnish an oppor- 
tunity for sin. Chastity, when he does dis- 
cover it, is not a matter of conscience, but is 
purely temperamental. A woman may be 
chaste just as she may be cross-eyed. She is 



GEORGE MOORE I3I 

not responsible for either. Some natures are 
too cold to sin ; they shrink from it only be- 
cause its promise does not stir them ; and in 
his philosophy natures such as these are rare 
and utterly abnormal. But over them George 
Moore devotes little time and thought. He 
sets the other type before us with a never-end- 
ing and persistent relish. When there appears 
upon the scene a woman's form, he thrusts it 
on us like a professional souteneur. With a 
frank brutality he catalogues her physical at- 
tractions ; a pervasive suggestion inspires his 
pen ; he mentally disrobes her, and he laughs 
softly with the cynical amusement of a Silenus 
as he notes the effect of his description. 

His men are, naturally enough, the moral 
complement of his women. He has never 
drawn one noble character, and there is no 
evidence in any of his work that he even com- 
prehends the English and American concep- 
tion of a high-bred gentleman. His world is 
a world of rakes and revellers, of cads, of 'Ar- 
ries and 'Arriets, with here and there a solitary 
figure, eccentric and unmanly, whose thin blood 
or mediaeval imagination leads him to slink 
into pure asceticism and to shudder at the 
joys of sense. And as among his women we 
miss the unselfish, the tender, the loyal, and 



132 GEORGE MOORE 

the loving, so among his men we find no high- 
minded, generous, manly gentleman whose chiv- 
alry and purity of soul remove him to an equal 
distance from the monkey-cage and the mon- 
astic cell. 

Such, then, is George Moore — a strange and 
striking product of French training, a blend of 
subtlety and coarseness, of cynicism and vo- 
luptuousness, of extreme refinement and inef- 
fable vulgarity ; a profound psychologist, a 
sensitivist who feels to his very finger-tips the 
slightest breath of influence, a genius fettered 
by the chains of pure materialism, yet none 
the less and with all his limitations and per- 
versities the greatest literary artist who has 
struck the chords of English since the death 
of Thackeray. 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

What is the psychological secret of the 
mysterious connection that exists between 
religious desire in man and the desire that is 
sensuous and even sensual? That there is 
some such relation it is impossible to doubt 
when we look into the records alike of litera- 
ture and of life. Let one turn to the confes- 
sions of Saint Augustine, the loftiest and great- 
est of the Latin Fathers, and read the appalling 
chronicle of those wallowings in sin through 
which he ultimately passed to the saintly life 
that still shines with undimmed purity down 
the path of human effort. Let one also call 
to mind the strangely dual life of Paul Ver- 
laine, who so often sat down, reeking with 
the odors of the foulest of Parisian gargotcs, 
to pour out in verse of almost superhuman 
sweetness the aspirations of a soul pro- 
foundly touched with religious yearning. 
Nor is it without a deep significance that in 
ancient times the worship of the gods was 



136 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

often blended with rites of indescribable eroti- 
cism, and that in all ages the vocabulary of 
religious exaltation has been borrowed from 
the language of human passion. The Song 
of Songs, ascribed to Solomon, is, to be sure, 
no longer viewed as a sacred allegory ; yet it 
was for many centuries so regarded, and the 
sternest and most ascetic Puritan was not re- 
volted by the thought that its amorous im- 
agery was meant to voice a spiritual senti- 
ment. To take a very modern instance, it 
was only a few years ago that one of the most 
widely popular of evangelical hymns was criti- 
cised, and not quite unreasonably, because its 
language was too emphatically suggestive of 
mere sexual desire. It may be, in fact, that 
there is something typical and significant in 
the legend of Saint Anthony, one of the holi- 
est of anchorites, whose chief temptation was 
that which filled his cell with visions of fair 
women. 

The subject is, perhaps, a little dangerous, 
and one need not here pursue it any further; 
yet it is quite irresistibly suggested by a vol- 
ume which now lies before me, entitled En 
Route, and which one may without exaggera- 
tion think not only the greatest novel of the 
day, but one of the most important, because 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC I37 

it is one of the most characteristic books of 
our quarter of the century. Until its author, 
M. Huysmans, wrote it, his name suggested to 
the readers of French literature nothing more 
than naturalistic fiction of the rankest and 
most brutal type — fiction that surpassed the 
most typical work of Zola in the frankness of 
its physiology and the shamelessness of its 
indecency. With A Reboiirs, which appeared 
in 1885, this Flemish Frenchman reached a 
sort of morbid climax both in subject and in 
treatment, and because of this Herr Nordau 
chose him out as embodying the quintessence 
of moral and literary degeneracy. Yet it 
seemed to many at the time of its appearance 
that in A Reboiirs there was to be detected a 
new and striking note, an indication of new 
currents of tendency, a drift away from merely 
physical analysis, a reaching out towards some- 
thing which, if not ethically higher, was at any 
rate more subtle and more psychologically in- 
teresting. The later works of M. Huysmans 
have made it plain that this assumption was a 
true one ; and since La Bas has been succeeded 
by this latest work, the true significance of the 
change is very clear. Taking these three nov- 
els together, one may rightly view them as 
embodying a single purpose — a purpose of 



138 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

which perhaps and probably the writer was 
himself not always fully conscious, but which, 
as his task proceeded, fully seized upon his in- 
tellect and was, no doubt, developed with the 
simultaneous development of his own experi- 
ence. 

For it is permissible to think that in setting 
before us the evolution of a true degenerate, 
M. Huysmans has been writing a spiritual and 
intellectual autobiography. Mr. Kegan Paul, 
to be sure, in an admirable introduction to 
his translation of the book, declares that such 
an assertion is both impertinent and unneces- 
sary; but even he avoids a flat denial of its 
truth. Whether it be impertinent or not, it 
will occur with great force to every one who 
knows the story of M. Huysmans' life and 
who is thoroughly familiar with his works ; nor 
can one think that the hypothesis is one 
which the author would himself resent. It 
seems, indeed, impossible that the strange 
things set forth in A Rcbours could have been 
imagined by a person whose own life had been 
free from any such experience, or that the in- 
tensity of feeling that marks the strongest 
chapters oi En Route could be merely the tour 
dc force of a clever writer. We shall not, there- 
fore, be far wrong if we assume that we have 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 39 

now before us the record of a searching self- 
analysis, however much the superficial inci- 
dents of the story be altered from the actual 
facts. This must be borne in mind, for the 
books, that form a sort of series, refer ostensi- 
bly to different persons ; yet it is, in reality, 
but one single experience that M. Huysmans 
is relating. For whether the protagonist be 
spoken of as Des Esseintes in A Rebours or as 
Durtal in En Route, the change of name im- 
plies no change in personality, nor in the con- 
ditions of the psychological and moral pro- 
blem that is presented for our contemplation. 
The story itself is the narrative of a man 
who has deliberately cultivated sensation to 
the point where it has touched the very ex- 
treme of enervation, and who in this persistent 
quest has exhausted the possibilities of phys- 
ical pleasure, until at last the morbid and the 
abnormal have reached the narrow line that 
marks the verge of sanity. This phase is set 
before us in A Rebours, perhaps the strangest 
effort of perverse imagination that literature 
can show. Here we find the degenerate al- 
ready sated with the pleasures of the flesh, 
jaded and fatigued, yet seeking still for some- 
thing to excite at least a momentary interest, 
and endeavoring to find it in the piquancy 



140 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

of a life in which everything shall be utterly 
abnormal, in which all the modes and all the 
conditions of ordinary existence shall be con- 
sistently reversed. He, therefore, creates for 
himself a home apart from any possible con- 
tact with other men, where in every possible 
way he follows out the cult of the artificial 
as being the supreme attainment of human 
genius. He is served by unseen attendants, 
who avoid entering his presence. He never 
quits his home. He sleeps, when his insomnia 
permits it, by day, and prowls about his habi- 
tation in the hours when other men are sleep- 
ing. His living-rooms are enclosed one within 
another, with holes that admit an artificial 
light through glass receptacles filled with water 
colored by essences to a muddy yellow, and 
containing mechanical fish that pass slowly 
back and forth through clusters of sham sea- 
weed. The chamber is impregnated with the 
smell of tar and decorated with crude litho- 
graphs of ships and seascapes. In this strange 
place he amuses himself with experimenting 
in the theories of Symbolism, translating each 
of the senses into terms of another. Wishing 
to hear music, he summons its sensations by 
drinking drops of curious liqueurs, whose effect 
upon the taste excites in his mind the sensa- 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC I4I 

tions analogous to those produced by different 
instruments of music — dry curacoa recalling 
the clarinet, gin and whiskey the trombone, 
anisette the flute, and Chios-raki and mastic 
the cymbal and the kettledrum. When he 
longs for the effect produced by pictures, he 
obtains it through his sense of smell, mixing 
together the perfumes that bring up before 
his depraved imagination landscapes or city 
scenes, the dressing-room of the theatre, or 
the surgeon's clinic, where ulcers and festering 
wounds attract his thought. His morbid in- 
genuity evokes from every scent an optical 
sensation, from the smell of stephanotis and 
ayapana to that of ordure and of human sweat. 
When he eats, and before his body revolts 
from the abnormality of his tastes, he dines 
on buttered roast beef dipped in tea. There 
is no need to recapitulate the further details 
of this phase of his development. On the 
face of it there seems to be nothing in the tale 
but what is morbid and delirious, and to a 
healthy mind both hideous and revolting. Yet, 
as has been already said, one can here detect 
a subtle note that is not found in Marthe 
pr Sceurs Vatard. The cult of the purely 
physical has ceased to satisfy, and there is 
a vaguely outlined longing for something 



142 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

intangible which the flesh alone cannot 
allay. 

In Lh Bas, the second novel of the series, 
this longing has taken a more definite form. 
We see a quite distinctly formulated interest 
in the spiritual, or at least the supernatural. 
Mere animalism retires into the background 
of the mental picture, though it still exists as 
a discordant and disturbing element. The 
degenerate hero of the book has turned his 
mind towards the phenomena of the religious 
sentiment as a sphere neglected heretofore, 
and perhaps quite capable of affording new 
sensations. Yet, as before in other things he 
utterly reversed all normal notions, so in this 
new quest his impulses are inspired by per- 
versity. He approaches religion from the 
stand-point of its contemner. Where a normal 
sinner would seek the influence of prayer and 
worship, Durtal enrolls himself among those 
fearful creatures who embrace the cult of Sa- 
tanism. These singular rites, as one tradition 
tells us, were brought to Western Europe from 
the East by the Knights Templars at the time 
of the Crusades, and were finally at least the 
pretext for the dissolution of that famous 
order. As many know, the cult survives in 
France, and has not been unknown in Eng- 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 43 

land during the past hundred years ; for stu- 
dents of Hterary history will remember how it 
found a devotee in Lord le Despencer, who 
practised it with men like Wilkes and Byron 
and Paul Whitehead at Medmenham in the 
old Cistercian abbey. Durtal is led by the 
influence of one Madame Chantelouve, a dia- 
bolic creature, to join in the frightful practices 
of the Satanists. He is present at a Black 
Mass, where blasphemy supplants the Litany, 
where prayer is mocked by cursing, and where 
images of the devil and his angels take the place 
of God and of the saints. By Madame Chante- 
louve he is lured into various acts of sacrilege, 
some of them involuntary; and thus he seems 
to have sunk to an even lower depth than 
when he lived the frankly pagan life of an ec- 
centric decadent. Yet one feels in laying 
down the book that the end is not yet ; that 
Durtal is still groping in the darkness, and 
that the very violence and outrageousness of 
his impulses may lead him at last into a re- 
action against the physical and moral disease 
that vexes him. 

In En Route we observe a striking contrast 
at the very outset. Durtal is presented to us 
as already weaned, in spirit at least, from the 
life that he has led so lonjr. He is shown as 



144 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

one who has accepted in the fullest sense the 
faith of the Catholic Church. The processes of 
his conversion are not detailed, but they may- 
be inferred from what is told us in the opening 
chapter. Led on by curiosity, and perhaps by 
a desire for new experiences, he began to study 
the manifestations of the religious sentiment, 
and at once his mind and imagination alike 
were seized and held fast by the artistic side 
of the Roman ritual. He set himself to learn 
the inner history of the Church, the lives of 
saints, and the story of passionate devotion 
which those lives have illustrated. He steeped 
himself in the spirit of the Middle Ages, and 
sought out those sanctuaries where that spirit 
still finds its manifestations apart from the 
sordidness of modern life. The stately Gre- 
gorian music, the child-like yet affecting forms 
of mediaeval art, the ancient churches whose 
chapels are dimmed by the smoke of innumera- 
ble censers and impregnated with the odor of 
extinguished tapers and of burning incense, ex- 
cited in him indescribable emotions. 

"Among these [churches] St. Severin seemed to 
Durtal the most exquisite and the most certain. He 
felt at home there ; he believed that if he could ever 
pray in earnest he could do it in that church ; and he 
said to himself that therein lived the spirit of the 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 145 

fabric. It is impossible but that the burning prayers, 
the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for- 
ever impregnated the pillars and stained the walls ; it 
is impossible but that the vine of sorrows whence of 
old the saints gathered warm clusters of tears has 
not preserved from those wonderful days emanations 
which sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame of 
sin and the gift of tears." 

He enters into the dim aisles of a vast cathe- 
dral and listens to the magnificent music that 
the distant choir sings. The passage is a strik- 
ing one : 

" Durtal sat down again. The sweetness of his soli- 
tude was enhanced by the aromatic perfume of wax 
and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it was 
suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the 
organ Durtal recognized the Dies Ira, that despairing 
hymn of the Middle Ages ; instinctively he bowed his 
head and listened. 

" This was no more, as in the De Profuttdis, a hum- 
ble supplication, a suffering which believes it has been 
heard, and discerns a path of light to guide it in the 
darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough 
not to tremble ; it was the cry of absolute desolation 
and terror. And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed 
tempestuously through these stanzas. They seemed 
addressed less to the God of Mercy, to the Son who 
listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him 
whom the Old Testament shows us overcome with 
anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke of the pyres 
10 



146 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

and the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. 
In this chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it 
threatened to strike the waters, and break in pieces 
the mountains, and to rend asunder the depths of 
heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed, 
cried out in fear. 

" A crystalline voice, a clear, child's voice, proclaim- 
ed in the nave the tidings of these cataclysms, and 
after this the choir chanted new strophes wherein 
the implacable judge came with shattering blare of 
trumpet to purify by fire the rottenness of the world. 

" Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though 
issuing from the crypt, accentuated the horror of these 
prophecies, made these threats more overwhelming; 
and after a short strain by the choir, an alto repeated 
them in still more detail. Then, as soon as the awful 
poem had exhausted the enumeration of chastisement 
and suffering, in shrill tones — the falsetto of a little 
boy — the name of Jesus went by, and a light broke in 
upon the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for 
pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the 
infinite mercies of the Saviour, and His pardon, plead- 
ing with Him for absolution, as formerly He had spared 
the penitent thief and the Magdalen. But in the same 
despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged 
again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of 
heaven, and the solos continued, discouraged, inter- 
rupted by the recurrent weeping of the choir, giving, 
with the diversity of voices, a body to the special con- 
ditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the dif- 
ferent ages of tears. 

" At last, when, still mixed and blended, these voices 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 47 

had borne away on the great waters of the organ all 
the wreckage of human sorrows, all the buoys of pray- 
ers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror, 
wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, 
stammering Dona ezs requiem, they ended, worn out, 
in an Amen so plaintive that it died away in a breath 
above the sobbing of the organ. 

"What man could have imagined such despair or 
dreamed of such disasters? And Durtal made answer 
to himself, ' No man.' " 

In fact, Durtal was brought back to religion 
by his love for art ; and the sight of the count- 
less worshippers who knelt day after day be- 
fore the crucifix shook to the depths his taint- 
ed soul. He believed, and his whole being 
cried out for a refuge from his disgust with 
life, his infinite weariness of self. But as yet 
he had faith alone. He could not pray ; he 
could not even master the temptations of the 
flesh that kept assailing him with even great- 
er strength than heretofore. He sinned and 
sinned again, even while his mind was full of 
these new emotions. But at this moment he 
fell under the influence of a priest, a shrewd, 
kindly man, of vast experience, cultivated, and 
a keen judge of human nature. Him Durtal 
consults, not as a priest so much as a sym- 
pathetic friend ; and little by little he yields to 
the kindly influence of the shrewd old Abbe. 



148 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

With infinite tact and delicate finesse the 
Abbe leads him on to take an interest in those 
orders in the Church that are purely contem- 
plative — especially the Trappist branch of the 
Cistercians. Little by little Durtal's imagina- 
tion is fired by the thought of a life of such 
pure devotion, until at last the Abbe Gevresin 
suggests that he spend a short time as a " re- 
treatant " in the Trappist monastery of Notre 
Dame de I'Atre, shut out from the world, and 
surrounded by the influence and example of 
those monks who approach in their lives the 
nearest to complete self-abnegation. Durtal is 
startled at the thought. He asks questions as 
to the restraints that are imposed upon a lay- 
man who enters even for a week a monastery 
such as this. His first objections are singular 
in their modernness. He is fond of cigarettes, 
and cannot think of giving up tobacco. He 
hates oily cookery, and he cannot digest milk 
in any form. But the notion of becoming a 
retreatant fascinates him. He reflects and hesi- 
tates. It occurs to him that he can perhaps 
find some way of smoking cigarettes by stealth 
in the woods about the monastery. He thinks 
that he can stand the cooking. At last, after 
days of internal conflict, he decides to go, and 
makes a prayer — a most curious prayer: 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 49 

" Take count of this, O Lord : I know by experience 
that when I am ill -fed I have neuralgia. Humanly, 
logically speaking, I am certain to be horribly ill at 
Notre Dame de I'Atre ; nevertheless, if I can get about 
at all, the day after to-morrow I will go all the same. 
In default of love, this is the only proof I can give that 
I desire Thee, that I truly hope and believe in Thee ; 
but do Thou, O Lord, aid me." 

The same odd mixture of modernity and 
mediaevalism is seen throughout. Durtal, with 
his mind filled by thoughts of St. Magdalen of 
Pazzi and Bonaventura and Dionysius the Are- 
opagite, stuffs his valise with pink packages of 
cigarettes, and Menier's sweet chocolate, and 
antipyrine, and sets out for the monastery 
from the Gare du Nord. It is impossible to 
give here even the briefest recapitulation of his 
experiences, which Huysmans tells with minute 
detail and the most extraordinary frankness. 
His life as a retreatant, his spiritual struggles, 
his mental battles with unbelief, his victories 
and his defeats, are vivid in their realism. One 
feels that this is just what w^ld be the expe- 
rience of a modern, only half-weaned from a 
loose and lawless life, suddenly plunged into 
an atmosphere of the strictest mediaevalism. 
This life keeps recurring to the imagination of 
Durtal. A certain Florence comes to his mind 



150 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

with maddening persistency. He sees continu- 
ally her sly face aping the modesty of a little 
girl, her slim body, her strange tastes that lead 
her to drink toilet -scents and to eat caviare 
with dates. Once he believes that Satan him- 
self enters the room and fills it with visions of 
horror. Again, in the midst of prayer, he is 
seized with a fearful longing to rise and yell 
out blasphemies. He finally goes to confession, 
and the scene is told with curious minuteness. 
Then at last a great calm comes upon him. 
The atmosphere of intense devotion, the sub- 
lime reality of the faith that inspires all about 
him, their life devoted to the single end of 
praise and worship and adoration, and the 
benignant and sympathetic kindness of the 
monks soothe and comfort and strengthen 
him. Here are rest and hope and perfect 
tranquillity; and the book ends with his regret- 
ful return to Paris and the expression of his 
longing for a life of religious contemplation. 

" If they [his loose companions] knew how inferior 
they are to the lowest of the lay brothers ! If they 
could imagine how the divine intoxication of a Trap- 
pist interests me more than all their conversations and 
all their books ! Ah, Lord, that I might live, live in 
the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon !" 

En Route is interesting in many ways. It is 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 151 

unique among the other books of Huysmans 
in style no less than in spirit. Here he has 
wholly put aside the studied bareness and 
hardness of expression that characterize his 
earlier method, and the descriptive passages 
glow with color and abound in strange felicities 
of expression. His enthusiasm for the purely 
mediaeval fairly carries him away, and I think 
has led him into indefensible extremes. Did 
space permit we should like to say something 
of his evident devotion to plain song as against 
the harmonized Gregorian chant of Palestrina, 
for I think that the greatest masters of church 
music would decline to follow him in his lack 
of discrimination between the plain song in the 
Prefaces to the Mass and in the other portions 
of the service where more than a single voice 
is necessary for the full effect. His enthusiasm 
leads him also into long and rather tedious 
digressions upon the history of the mediaeval 
saints, whose lives he insists upon detailing 
with remorseless elaboration, so that the effect 
produced is thoroughly inartistic from a liter- 
ary point of view, and gives the impression of 
one who has crammed up a subject and is un- 
willing to lose any portion of his material. 

Interesting also is the psychological side of 
the book, with its implied thesis that faith, like 



152 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 

all other emotions, is contagious ; and with its 
illustration of the thought with which I com- 
menced this paper, that the sensual nature 
under certain influences can become the most 
profoundly spiritual and religious. M. Huys- 
mans is usually classified as one of the disciples 
of Emile Zola ; but Zola could never have 
written a book like this, for, in spite of the 
contrary opinion that prevails, Zola is no sen- 
sualist, in the fullest meaning of the word. 
He is only an intense materialist, and he lacks 
a sympathetic insight into phenomena that 
are purely spiritual. He is like the photogra- 
pher who, with equal unconcern and as a mat- 
ter of mere business, will in the same hour turn 
his camera upon the dead child in its coffin 
filled with flowers, or upon the leering dancer 
in her spangled tights. 

To those of us who are Protestants the book 
is full of deep instruction in revealing with 
startling force the secret of the power of that 
wonderful religious organization which has 
made provision for the needs of every human 
soul, whether it requires for its comfort active 
service or the mystical life of contemplation. 
We see how every want is understood and how 
for every spiritual problem an answer is pro- 
vided ; how the experience of twenty centuries 



THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 153 

has been stored up and recorded, and how all 
that man has ever known is known to those 
who guide and perpetuate this mighty system. 
And in these days when Doctors of Divinity 
devote their energies to nibbling away the 
foundations of historic faith, and when the 
sharpest weapons of agnosticism are forged 
on theological anvils, there is something reas- 
suring in the contemplation of the one great 
Church that does not change from age to age, 
that stands unshaken on the rock of its con- 
victions, and that speaks to the wavering and 
troubled soul in the serene and lofty accents 
of divine authority. 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

It must seem a little curious to many read- 
ers of current literature that Max Nordau's 
ponderous indictment of modern civilization 
has so soon and so completely passed into the 
limbo of half-forgotten things. There was a 
moment when it appeared as though a great 
light had flashed upon the dark corners of so- 
ciety, displaying abysmal depths of foulness 
and corruption lying all about us; as though 
for an instant there had been revealed a ghast- 
ly spectre hovering over the modern world 
and, like the Erl-King of German legend, 
reaching out a hideous paw to destroy all that 
is dearest and holiest in the lives of mortal 
men. To-day, while in the remoter parts of 
the country Degeneration has probably its 
share of startled readers, the world at large 
has ceased to think of it ; and its portentous 
pages have left no mark behind them save the 
addition of a few phrases to the literary slang 
of the time, and perhaps a deeper taint upon 



158 THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

the morbid imagination of a few disordered 
minds. What appeared for the moment to be 
the voice of one crying in the wilderness to 
prepare the social cosmos for the damnation 
that was sure to come, is now very clearly seen 
to have been merely a well-timed though un- 
wholesome and spasmodic literary sensation. 

It is the strange rapidity and completeness 
of this decline of interest in Nordau's fulmina- 
tions that make the various volumes written 
to refute his arguments appear almost as an- 
tiquated as an attack on Fourierism or as a 
serious polemic against the Millerite delusion. 
Thinking men have taken Nordau's measure. 
They have analyzed his utterances, and ex- 
amined his facts, and tested the logic of his 
deductions ; and as a result of their examina- 
tion they have laid his book aside and turned 
to other and more profitable themes. 

It is, of course, from one point of view, un- 
fair to drag into a discussion the personality 
of a writer in estimating the value of his theses, 
for this sort of thing is bound to smack of the 
argument ad Jiomincni ; yet in the case of 
Herr Nordau it is impossible not to reflect 
upon his character and temperament as re- 
vealed in all his published work ; for a knowl- 
edge of these things has undoubtedly contrib- 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 159 

uted to minimize the influence of his book. 
Moreover, one need feel no great compunction 
in speaking of him very frankly, for in Degen- 
eration he has erected a whole mountain of 
theory upon his own estimate of living men, 
and has taken it upon himself in the most off- 
hand fashion to define their motives and to 
question their sincerity. And when his book 
was flung before the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon 
world, the first question asked on every hand 
was, " Who is Nordau ? " 

A quick-witted Jew, imbued, like many of 
his race to-day, with an impenetrable material- 
ism, a sceptic and yet a doctrinaire, Nordau 
is less an individual than a type, and a type 
raised to the ;/th. For him the world of spirit 
has absolutely no existence, the altruistic mo- 
tive no force, ideal beauty no reality. Trained 
to study the perversities of the phenomena 
that are revealed to the alienist, tracing every- 
thing to a physical source, and accepting to 
the full the theories of his master, Lombroso, 
he is an ideal illustration of the credulity of 
science. He cannot believe in imagination 
save as a symptom of irrationality ; he cannot 
recognize any love of beauty save as a mani- 
festation of erotomania. Yet he can worship 
physiology as a clue to all the mysteries of 



l6o THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

life, and think himself able to sound the very 
depths of the human soul by measuring men's 
ears and noting down the conformation of 
their frontal bones. From the earliest days 
of his student life he seems to have had a 
strangely morbid curiosity as to the abnormal. 
He pried into all the dark corners of diseased 
mentality; he collected all the prurient details 
of the psychiatrist's practice ; and with an avid 
delight he gleaned in the remotest fields of 
sexual psychopathy. The few unhappy creat- 
ures who in another age would have raved be- 
hind the bars of a mad-house, but whom the 
printing-press has given to-day a speaking-tube 
to reach the public ear, Nordau watches with 
the joy of a connoisseur, jotting down in a 
note-book every fearful phrase, and garnering 
up every perverse, disjointed thought. He 
wades through whole libraries, to wrench from 
its context any bit of reprehensible descrip- 
tion and add it to his collection. Presently 
he has volumes upon volumes of this sort of 
stuff ; he has haunted the hospitals and asy- 
lums, and made for himself a little world of 
his own, peopled by the ghastly figures of the 
diseased, the dying, and the degenerate ; and 
then at last he comes out into the greater 
world — the world of sunlight and sanity — with 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU l6l 

a mind that has itself become perverted, a 
mind that has lost its sense of proportion, and 
has grown intellectually color-blind. He has 
so accustomed himself to watching for telltale 
symptoms that he sees them on every side, 
even in the healthiest mind and the soundest 
body. The slightest coincidences are to him 
conclusive evidence of identity ; and he puts his 
own hideous interpretation upon everything 
that meets his view, until, as has been very 
truly said, he is himself an abnormality and a 
pathological type. Every large hospital for 
the insane knows his representative— the one 
sane man in a world of lunatics. Yet there is 
a very apparent method in his madness. He 
has a canny, commercial side to him that is ex- 
tremely characteristic of his race ; and seeing 
that certain topics are attracting some atten- 
tion, and that the world is ready for a new 
sensation, he infers that the psychological 
moment has arrived ; and at once, gathering up 
his ponderous note-books, he compacts them 
into a bulky volume, garnishes them with a 
pseudo-scientific sauce, cooks up a theory to 
justify his exposure, and launches the delect- 
able combination upon an appreciative mar- 
ket. 

Probably the strongest proof of the falsity 



l62 THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

of Nordau's view of society is to be found 
in the sensation which his book created ; for 
this sensation was not that which springs from 
startled conviction and guilty recognition, but 
from sheer astonishment and incredulity. It 
was the shock which might be felt by a trav- 
eller who, walking quietly along a pleasant 
road, should find his way blocked by a mighty 
avalanche of muck. At first he might beheve 
that here was some great cataclysm, some won- 
derful phenomenon of nature ; but a moment's 
inspection would speedily convince him that, 
after all, it was muck, and nothing more. And 
so with Nordau's book. The world wondered 
for a moment, because the world at large had 
never even dreamed that such things as Nordau 
wrote of were in existence. Thousands of in- 
telligent men and women had never so much 
as heard the names of Huysmans and Nietz- 
sche and Paul Verlaine. The subtleties of the 
Symbolists were unknown to them. They had 
innocently looked upon Wagner as a great 
master of dramatic music, upon Ruskin as a 
refined and stimulating critic, upon Tolstoi as 
a powerful novelist and a sincere if impractica- 
ble humanitarian. And as to the darker and 
more repellent facts set forth by Nordau from 
the treatises of Krafft-Ebing and other special- 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 163 

ists in neuropathy, of these thhigs they had 
never even had an inkling. Therefore, just as 
the traveller described above, after looking for 
a moment at the muck -heap, would simply 
hold his nose and pass around it, so Nordau's 
readers, after a very short consideration of his 
pages, metaphorically held their noses and 
turned away from the further contemplation 
of his pornographic pile. 

Some few, however, interested in the ab- 
normality of the whole thing, lingered for 
a while to investigate it in a scientific spirit ; 
and these speedily found good reasons for the 
contempt which was with the world at large 
a matter of unerring instinct and intuition. 
They at once detected the unreality and fun- 
damental unimportance of it all. They noted 
the singular perversity that deduced from ev- 
ery intellectual product of the age one and the 
same conclusion ; that called one man a maniac 
because he wrote so much, and another man 
a maniac because he wrote so little ; that set 
down still another as an incipient criminal be- 
cause his ears were said to be pointed at the 
ends, and a fourth as subject to " echolalia " 
because his verse abounds in cadenced repeti- 
tions ; that in one place declared human beings 
too good and noble to need the fear of hell, 



164 THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

and in another place described them as too vile 
to dispense with the fear of the gallows and 
the hangman. 

They noted him saying that material success 
in life is a test of sound-mindedness, and yet 
considering just how far the same success is 
evidence of degeneracy. They saw him also, 
with a subtlety of erotic suggestion, detecting 
sexuality in what all men before him had seen 
nothing but the beauty and the joy of art, and 
infusing a lingering taint into some of the 
noblest creations of the human imagination. 
Finally, they turned to what Nordau had him- 
self produced in the sphere of fiction, and there 
finding writ large the sordid sensuality which 
he had wantonly ascribed to the masters of 
modern literature, they at once convicted him 
beyond the possibility of defence of all that he 
had claimed to see in others. It needed only 
a clear appreciation of these things to discredit 
and refute the whole elaborate attack that he 
had made upon the age ; and when it was quite 
plainly understood that the author of Degen- 
eration was himself simply a stray degenerate, 
raving with foul words at his environment, all 
interest in him, save as in an abnormal type, 
at once declined. 

To my mind the most forceful and truly il- 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 1 65 

luminative comment on his book is that in 
which the anonymous author of a recent vol- 
ume c:i\\ed Rcgcncratioji traces in Nordau'swork 
and in his mental attitude the influence of a 
powerful German bias, and which sets forth in 
very vigorous and convincing language the es- 
sential traits of the typical German. A single 
sentence will sufifice to give the reader a clue 
to his argument : 

"German education and German surroundings tend 
to foster in the human mind veneration for authority, 
contempt for the plebeian, distrust of liberty, a firm 
belief in the unquenchable power of man's lowest in- 
stincts, a nervous demand for authoritative repression 
of human passions, and contentment with prosaic ex- 
istence, small resources, and poor prospects." 

How true this is and how far-reaching is the 
truth in its practical manifestations, every one 
who has lived in Germany, or who has studied 
German character as mirrored in German his- 
tory and in the social characteristics of the 
German people, must be profoundly conscious. 
The typical German is a being who, if he gives 
play to the higher and more creative impulses 
at all, does so only in the sphere of imagina- 
tion, while his actual life is dominated by the 
most intense materialism. A pure sentimen- 



l66 THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

talist, his thought and his action have apparent- 
ly no relation whatever to each other. He con- 
templates with intellectual enthusiasm the ideal 
beauty, and he lives contented with the most 
squalid environment. He worships ideal purity, 
and he indulges himself in methodical sensual- 
ity. He writes lachrymose verse imbued with 
chivalrous sentiment for woman, and then he 
yokes his wife with a dog or an ass and sets 
her ploughing in his potato-fields. He can de- 
scribe on paper an elaborate Utopia of justice 
and political perfection, and he is governed by 
one of the rankest and most brutal despotisms 
that ever smothered human freedom under the 
bonds of a military bureaucracy. Hence it is 
that the Germans, with all their training and 
all their many admirable traits, are lacking in 
constructiveness, in spontaneity, in creative 
boldness. When things go wrong, and when 
an American or an Englishman would take his 
coat off and set them right by the vigor and 
originality of his native energy, a German 
rolls up his eyes helplessly and begins to whim- 
per for some higher power to tell him what 
to do. A curious indication of this national 
proneness to despair is seen in the fact that of 
all the suicides recorded in our daily press by 
far the greater number is that of men and 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 167 

women with German names. And this is wliy 
the history of Germany is what it is — a history 
of divided and discordant principalities, of a 
people submitting to the rule of a hundred 
petty despots, unable to do more than maunder 
over the liberty that none of them would 
strike a blow to win ; of a people who forgot at 
Napoleon's bidding their national self-respect, 
and fought his battles for him against their 
own kindred and natural allies. In 1848 they 
had a chance to show what they could do at 
constructing a parliamentary government, and 
they produced nothing but a windy debating 
society of visionary doctrinaires, to be soon 
dismissed contemptuously by a military prince. 
When some strong, masterful spirit arises 
among them — a man like Frederick the Great 
or Bismarck — they do not use him as a nation- 
al instrument, but he sets his foot on all their 
necks and forces them to do his bidding. 
Hence it is that Germany presents to-day the 
astounding spectacle of a nation, the most 
highly educated in the world, governed by 
drill-sergeants and sub-lieutenants, accepting a 
regime that makes it a penal offence to speak 
disrespectfully of an artillery -mule, and in 
which the best born, the most eminent, and 
the most highly trained all flock with enthusias- 



l68 THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

tic self-abasement to lick the jack-boots of a 
pinchbeck Caesar. 

It is quite reasonable, therefore, to recognize 
in Nordau's book a true reflection of the Ger- 
man temperament. The pedantic marshalling 
of documentary evidence to convict whole 
nations, the intellectual near-sightedness that 
sees no further than the hospital and the dis- 
secting-room and that knows nothing of the 
play of forces in the greater world beyond, 
the moral cowardice, the negation of hope, the 
grossness of the materialism, the suspicious 
distrust, the attempt to reduce the things of 
the spirit to an unvarying formula — surely 
these are not the traits of the broad-minded, 
far-seeing, and sane philosopher. They sug- 
gest rather the Herr Professor in his stuffy 
study, evolving from his books and from his 
inner consciousness a theory for interminable 
exploitation in the lecture - room. Nordau's 
whole work, in fact, came bearing the ear-marks 
of a nation that regards an intelligent machine 
as the perfection of human progress, that finds 
in every vista an impasse, and that sees in every 
paltry mole-hill the menace of a mighty moun- 
tain. 

But what is one to say of Nordau's main 
contention that our age is marked with the 



THE PASSING OF NORDAU 169 

stigmata of degeneracy? Is the world really- 
growing better or is it growing worse ? Prob- 
ably the serious student of social phenomena 
would say that in reality there is little actual 
gain from one generation to another, but that 
in all ages and among all civilized peoples the 
sum total of essential morality remains un- 
changed. At one period some particular vice 
or some particular virtue will be in the ascen- 
dant, and at another period another. In early 
Rome, for instance, chastity and personal hon- 
esty were the rule, yet they were accompanied 
by an utter lack of humanity and of the softer 
virtues. A wife could be beaten to death for 
drinking wine ; Cato could order an innocent 
slave to be slain merely to impress the other 
serfs with their master's power. Under the 
Empire such cruelty became impossible, yet 
the growth of the sentiment of mercy was co- 
incident with a decline of integrity and of 
sexual morality. And so, too, in the case of 
contemporaneous peoples, neither the especial 
vice nor the especial virtue of the one is neces- 
sarily that of the other. There is no doubt, 
for instance, that the standard of commercial 
morality is appreciably higher in England than 
in the United States, and that the laws of 
property are held to be more sacred there than 



lyo THE PASSING OF NORDAU 

here ; but, on the other hand, the brute who 
in England kicks his wife with heavy clogs 
gets off with a small fine, while to all men is 
permitted a degree of license in the sphere 
of personal morality which if practised here 
would insure an instant ostracism. 

And so the balance is apparently kept even. 
Yet, after all, the impartial student of manners, 
who looks back over the pages of history and 
the record of men's lives, can scarcely fail to 
perceive with every cycle a certain steady prog- 
ress that is not merely onward, but upward too. 
The dark side of the picture is not quite so 
dark as it was once, and the bright side is far 
brighter. The standards of virtue are, at any 
rate, accepted now by all men, and acceptance 
must ultimately mean observance also. Hu- 
manity moves onward with a stumbling step 
and many a halt, yet it does advance, and with 
every century its gaze is fixed with an increas- 
ing steadiness upon the lofty and immutable 
ideals of justice and mercy and purity and 
truth. 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

Lest the reader should find, as he easily 
might, some ambiguity in the title of this 
short paper, it may be well to explain, by 
way of premise, that popular songs are here 
taken to mean only the songs of the day, 
ephemeral, trivial, and of little or no musi- 
cal value — the songs that spring up, as it 
Avere, in a night, that are sung and whistled 
and played for a few weeks or months, and 
are then forgotten. The songs that endure 
for generations, though often of no greater 
intrinsic merit, are more truly described as 
national songs ; for the national song is by 
no means necessarily one whose words and 
music, or even the circumstances of whose 
composition, are associated with an historical 
or patriotic event. The Ranz des Vaches, for 
instance, is most truly the national air of 
Switzerland, though it is only a herdsman's 
strain ; and Bayard Taylor's poem keeps alive 
the fact that on the eve of the bloodiest battle 



174 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

of the Crimean War the Scotch regiments fed 
their martial spirit by singing, not the stirring 
music of their grandest battle-hymn, Scots wha 
hae, but the simple strains of Annie Laurie. 
Just what gives vitality to some of these songs 
it is hard to say ; but the fact is plain enough 
that while most of them pass out of memory 
Avithin a year, a (qw express in some subtle 
way the deeper feelings of a nation and live 
throughout the rest of its history. Thus Part- 
ant pour la Syrie, and ^a Ira, and the Car- 
magnole, and Yankee Doodle, and MarcJiing 
Through Georgia will outlive the French and 
American republics, while En R'vnant de la 
Revue, and Pire la Victoire, and Just Before 
the Battle, and We Don't Want to Fight are 
forgotten in a single generation. And the 
reason for the immortality of the one set and 
for the oblivion of the other is about equally 
mysterious. 

The popular song, however, in the restricted 
sense of the word — the song of the whistling 
boy and the street-piano — is at present often 
able to secure a brief respite from immediate 
forgetfulness, to cheat oblivion, and secure a 
second lease of life by a species of migration. 

In these days, when travel is cheap and when 
each nation, being more or less informed about 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 175 

its neighbor's doings, finds it an amusing thing 
to be imitative and cosmopoHtan, the popular 
song is one of the objects that, Hke food, fash- 
ions, and Hterature, are amiably borrowed. 
Thus it happens that when some ditty has 
become such a nuisance in the land of its 
birth as to make its public rendition more or'* 
less unsafe, it suddenly disappears, and almost 
immediately reappears in some other country, 
where it is treated as an attractive novelty. 
When it springs up again in this way among 
a people whose language is not that of its 
author, it often suffers a sea-change; but the 
music is usually unaltered, while the transfor- 
mation of its words is often very characteristic 
and amusing. 

One would say a priori that England and 
America would be the greatest borrowers of 
the chansonctte. As Germany is the most 
musical land in the world, and as France is 
the home of the caf^ chantant, it might be 
supposed that the English "music-hall" and 
the American " variety show " would find the 
French and German airs an inexhaustible store 
to borrow from. But the truth of the matter 
is quite the reverse, and for two very different 
reasons. As regards Germany, it is precisely 
because the Germans are so musical that the 



176 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

foreign conveyer of popular songs finds so 
little to appropriate. The German's taste in 
music is so educated and he takes his music 
so seriously, as to make nonsense-songs, such 
as those of our country and of England, ap- 
pear to him neither amusing nor agreeable. 
They are simply monstrosities, fit only for ec- 
centric and Philistine nations, such as he sup- 
poses us to be. The Tingeltangel plays no 
such important part in the economy of his 
amusements as does the cafe chantant in the 
diversions of the French. When he listens to 
music, it must be good in itself. The differ- 
ence is well seen in such an establishment as 
Kroll's Garten, in Berlin — a place in many re- 
spects akin to the Folies Bergere, of Paris. It 
is an immense beer-garden ; yet its open-air 
music is rendered by a really fine orchestra, 
supplemented occasionally by some of the 
military bands of the garrison ; while in the 
adjacent theatre appear singers of interna- 
tional celebrity, who interpret the roles of the 
lighter of the grand operas, such as the Meis- 
tersingcr, the Tronipetcr von Sdkingen, and The 
Flying Dutchman. In fact, the German sel- 
dom descends to any lower depth, musically, 
than the comic opera ; and when an American, 
an Englishman, or a Frenchman would be hum- 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 177 

ming TJie Band Played On or Gigolette, a Ger- 
man contents himself with a bit of Millocker 
or Suppe — something far from classical, if you 
will, but by no means cheap and vulgar. And 
as he does not himself produce our sort of 
popular song, still less does he import those 
which we have made. Some of Gilbert and 
Sullivan's comic operas he will tolerate (the 
airs from the Mikado were rather popular in 
Germany at one time), and Mr. Reginald De 
Koven is not unknown ; but that is the limit 
of his toleration. It is true that in the numer- 
ous Tingeltangels our comic songs are often 
heard, but they are sung in their original form 
by foreign singers, English and American, and 
are listened to by the Germans in the same 
spirit in which a visitor to Chinatown enjoys 
the performance of a Mongolian orchestra. 
Hence our purveyors of popular music find 
nothing of the kind in Germany to appropri- 
ate ; but with true American audacity they 
have gone straight to the classical music, and 
from it have filched innumerable themes. It 
may not be generally known, for instance, that 
the chorus of OJi^Hoiv I Love My Ada is taken 
bodily from the overture to Zanetta, that the 
chorus of Paradise Alley is an echo of the 
drinking-song in Cavalleria Ricsticana, that 



178 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

Anyiie Rooney is taken directly, with a mere 
change of tempo, from a chorale of Bach ; and 
that Down went McGinty is stolen from an- 
other. It is an amusing fact that Wagner 
derived the so-called bell-motif in Parsifal 
from the last-named source ; so that we have 
the great master of modern music drinking 
from the same fountain of inspiration as the 
author of Down went McGinty ! 

Again, not very much is borrowed from the 
French. The reason for this is to be found, I 
think, in the musical characteristics of the 
French cJiansonettes. The French popular 
music is eminently vivacious ; it has a sort 
of sparkle that is distinctly Gallic ; but there 
is something about it that makes it rather un- 
attractive to an English ear. It is too jerky ; 
it lacks rhythm and melody ; and it does not 
easily fix itself in the memory. It is, in fact, 
rather thin, and irresistibly suggests the nasal 
tones and cracked pianos of the gargotes 
through which it finally passes into obliv- 
ion. Hence it is not often borrowed, the 
exceptions being found principally in semi- 
military songs. These are occasionally trans- 
planted to England and America, though they 
are there not sung, but arranged for military 
bands and for orchestras. An instance of this 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 1 79 

is the Boulangist chant, En Rvnant de la Re- 
vue, first sung by Paulus at the Alcazar d'Ete, 
and speedily taken up all over France by the 
partisans of the brav Gdnc'ral. It was at 
once cabled to this country (a journalistic 
feat achieved by the New York Herald), and 
was heard everywhere, but only as an air, no 
words ever having been written for it in Eng- 
lish, so far as I know. A later French success, 
Pere la Victoire, likewise " created " by Paulus 
at the Eldorado, was at one time a good deal 
played by military bands in England, where it 
was also set to new words ; but as a song it had 
no success. Therefore, the fact remains that 
while we borrow French fashions, French 
cookery, French plays, and French nov&ls, 
the Anglo-Saxon world cares very little for 
French popular songs. 

Equally unsuccessful has proved the attempt 
to adapt for English and American use any of 
the numerous canzonette of Italy, and for the 
same reasons. Perhaps the last attempt to 
make a hit in this way was that of Miss Lot- 
tie Collins, who, after the song which is es- 
pecially associated with her name had been 
worn threadbare, announced with a good deal 
of journalistic trumpeting a new one entitled 
Marguerite of Monte Carlo. This was in real- 



l8o THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

ity an English adaptation of a Neapolitan can- 
zone by the popular song- writer Piedigrotta, 
first sung at the Salone Margherita in Naples in 
1892, when it caught the fancy of the populace 
immensely, and was soon sung, whistled, and 
played all over Italy. The original was called 
Margarita dc Parete, and was written in dia- 
lect. It has a good deal of swing to it, but in 
spite of Miss Collins's own popularity, and her 
persistent efforts to make it a success, it fell 
rather flat, and never reached the street-piano. 
Not many of our popular airs, then, are for- 
eign ; but a very great many of ours are caught 
up by the French, especially those songs whose 
English words have a jingle that tickles the 
Gallic ear with a suggestion of eccentricity. 
Such, for example, is an absurd but rather 
tuneful ditty, once much in vogue in England, 
though never very well known in this country, 
and entitled Linger Longer, Loo. The original 
is by Messrs. Young and Sidney Jones, and it 
so amused the first Frenchman who heard it 
that it was almost immediately carried to 
Paris. French words were written by M. 
Henri Dreyfus, the English chorus being re- 
tained, and it was sung by no less a personage 
than the famous Yvette Guilbert, and later by 
Mile. Duclerc at the Folies Berg^re. The first 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS l8l 

verse of the French rendering will give a good 
idea of Ic genre Aiiglaisiste, so called : 

^a nVous amuse pas c'que j' dis lu 

Moi non plus je I'atteste, 

Mais il faut bien par ci par la, 

Chanter de tout et I'reste. 

Mon repertoire est folichon 

A c'que dis'nt les families 

Aussi ma p'tite English chanson 

Est fait' pour les jeunes (illes. 

Leurs papas diront c'est plus beau 

Bien qu' vous n' compreniez pas un mot. 

Ell's pens'ront, siir, y'a pas d'plaisir 

Du moment qu'on n' peut pas rougir! 

"Linger longer, Lucy, linger longer. Loo, 
How I love to linger, Lticy, linger long o' yon ; 
Listen -while I sing, ah, tell nie you'll be true. 
Linger lojtger, longer linger, linger longer. Loo!" 

The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo 
was a great favorite with the French, and their 
version of it was a close paraphrase of the Eng- 
lish, though it very characteristically repre- 
sented the breaker of the bank as a woman, 
and not a man. The title of it w2iS J'ai fait 
santcr la banqne a Monte Carlo, h.'s, a rule, the 
niusic alone is taken, the French words having 
no reference to the original ones. Thus, Daisy 
Bell, or, as the French usually wrote it. Daysey 



l82 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

Bell, furnished the music for a rather amusing 
set of verses by M, Dreyfus, who is an Anglo- 
phobe, in which Ics Anglaiscs pour rire are vig- 
orously mocked — their diet of bifteck, rumsteck, 
and other viandcs saignantcs, their prudery, and 
their dress. A verse may serve to amuse the 
reader. 

A Paris va des Anglaises 

L'air sec, avec 
Des appas comm' des punaises 
Des dents longu's et jaun's dans I'bec. 
Sur r boul'vard chacun' circule 
Vetu' comm' d'un foureau 
D'un macfarlaii ridicule 
Coiffe' d'un tout p'tit chapeau ! 

All right I All right' 

Rien ne les emotionne ; 

All right! All right ! 

Rien ne les passionne ; 

Ell's ont la sech'ress' d'un' planche, 

Ell's ont aussi sa raideur, 

Que c'soit la s'maine ou I'dimanche 

Un rien offense leur pioudeur! 

Tlie chorus of this had ah"nost as much suc- 
cess in France as the original enjoyed in Eng- 
land and the United States ; and up to the 
present time, when a gamin wishes to jeer at 
a stray Englishman, he greets him with the 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 183 

" All right !" which, together with " Aoh yes !" 
is regarded in France as the shibboleth of the 
Anglo-Saxon race. 

As might be expected, Tai-ara-boom-dc-ay ex- 
actly suited the Anglaisistes. It had scarcely 
appeared in England and America before a 
French rendering was rushed into print, in fact 
so rapidly that the author of it, M. Fabrice 
Lemon, failed to notice the exact title of the 
original and altered a syllable, his version bear- 
ing the name Tha-inara-bouni-di-Ji^ ; but it was 
a great success, being sung at one and the 
same time at four of the principal cafe's con- 
certs — the Alcazar, the Horloge, the Ambas- 
sadeurs, and the Folies Bergcre. Before, how- 
ever, any French version at all had been made, 
the present writer, being in a provincial town 
in Normandy, read one day an announcement 
of the local theatre to the effect that on the 
following evening a new one-act play would be 
presented, with the remarkable title Miss Kiss- 
viy, in which the forward manners of the typi- 
cal vices Anglaise\NOw\di be held up to the rep- 
robation of a virtuous French audience. It 
was also announced as a special attraction that 
a certain Mile. Dufort would, in the course of 
the play, sing the celcbre chanson Anglaise, 
Tha-ra-ra-bouvi-der-i. When the time came 



184 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

and Mile. Dufort appeared she had an immense 
audience. The first few lines made it evident 
(not to the audience, however) that this inge- 
nious young woman had shrunk from the task 
of " getting up " the Hnes of the genuine ver- 
sion, but had instead constructed a set of 
verses of her own by piecing together all the 
English words she had ever heard. The first 
verse, then, ran something like this : 

Ticket tramway clergyman 
Bifteck rumsteck rosbif van, 
Sandwich whitebaits lady lunch 
Cheri-gobler, wiskey-ponche ; 
Aoh-yes all right shocking stop 
Pel-el why-not moton-chop, 
Plum-kek miousic steamer boxe, 
Boule-dogue high-life five-o'clocks. 
Tha-ra-ra-boum-der-e, etc. 

It was an immense success. The audience 
rose at her. They knew that the English was 
all right, because they themselves recognized 
a good many of the words. She had an ova- 
tion and nine encores ; and this was probably 
the first rendition of the cclcbre chanson on 
French soil. 

It has already been noted that the French, 
in taking over the English popular songs, sel- 
dom or never translate the words literally. 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 185 

The reason of this is very characteristic. In 
the first place, the French mind is too logically 
reasonable to relish mere nonsense such as de- 
lights with a childish joy a typical Anglo-Saxon 
audience. Possibly the Gallic lack of humor 
also stands in the way of an appreciation of 
pure absurdity. In the second place, the French 
have an innate literary instinct that demands 
precision, neatness of phrasing, and point, in 
even the lightest verses to which they are asked 
to listen ; and the commonplaces of our senti- 
mental ballads are to them indescribably inane. 
Hence in the lines that they write for our popu- 
lar music there are to be found almost always 
a wit and a meaning to which the English 
words have no claim. Yet in another way 
the balance is in our favor; for an unpleasant 
French trait almost always mars their verses — 
the fondness for striking the note of the un- 
cleanly suggestive. Our English words may 
be utterly nonsensical, their sentiment may be 
commonplace and its expression mawkish, yet 
both words and sentiment are clean and whole- 
some ; the nonsense is good, honest nonsense, 
and one never carries away, after listening to 
it, an unpleasant taste ; and this quality in our 
popular songs and popular singers is far better 
than all the tainted wit of a Dreyfus and a 



l86 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

Baneux, and the inspired diablerie of Yvette 
Guilbert and Duhamel. A good instance of 
how the French bedevil an innocent piece of 
fun can be seen by comparing the EngHsh 
popular song Ting-a-li?ig with the French ver- 
sion called Ling-a-ling, first sung by Edmee 
Lescot at the Casino de Paris. The EngHsh 
is a rollicking bit of harmless nonsense ; but 
of the French version there is not a single 
stanza that I should venture to reprint. 

There is one thing which seems quite remark- 
able in the popular songs of the French to-day, 
and which has a deep significance of its own. 
When we reflect upon the fact that France is 
now in reality a great armed camp, that its 
people are waiting with a feverish anxiety — 
an intense feeling of hope and fear — for the 
inevitable hour when they shall strike the great 
blow to avenge the humiliation of 1870; when 
one remembers how intensely martial is the 
spirit of the whole nation, how it is yearning 
for its old supremacy and for the glory that 
was dimmed at Gravelotte and Sedan, and at 
the same time recalls how effusive the French 
temperament is, it is simply marvellous to find 
the singers of the people's songs so silent on 
the one theme that lies closest to every patri- 
otic Frenchman's heart. No ballads revile the 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 1S7 

hated Prussian ; no martial songs call for the 
hastening of the day of reckoning ; no new 
Beranger puts into the lyrics of the street the 
fierce longing that throbs in the pulses of so 
many millions. This very silence, ominous, 
universal, is the most profoundly impressive 
evidence of the intensity of the flame that 
needs no outward fanning to keep it in a glow. 
"The shallows murmur, but the deeps are 
dumb"; and the underlying thought seems 
to be this: that to recall the horrors of 1870 
would be humiliating, unbearable ; while to 
sing of what all hope for in the future would 
be only to play the braggart's part in the face 
of possibilities that make the lightest spirit 
shrink back with awe from their contemplation. 
I have said that there is scarcely a trace in 
any popular song of the spirit of rcvatiche ; yet 
here and there a word, a phrase, or a turn of 
expression reveals it as by a flash. One of the 
most striking illustrations of this, and perhaps 
the boldest, is found in the MarcJic dcs Treize 
Jours, a song that was sung all over France 
not very long ago. It is professedly only a 
comic song, narrating the amusing experiences 
of a rcscrviste who goes into camp to perform 
his thirteen days of required military service ; 
but the last verse strikes a different note : 



l88 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 

Ouand les treiz' jours sont termines 
L'general nous dit: "J' vous r'mercie, 
Vous etes dign's de vos aines! 
A I'appel sacre de la Patrie 

Tous vous viendrez 

Et me direz : 

" ' Les Treize Jours ne tremblent pas ! 
Pour repousser les hordes etrangeres 
Nous saurons tous dans les combats 
Nous battr' comm' de vieux militaires!' " 
Puis nous montrant notre drapeau, 
" Sachez mourir," dit-il, "pour sa defense!" 
Et l'general elevant son chapeau, 
Nous dit "A bientot! Vive la France!" 

There is a world of meaning to every French- 
man in that a bientot ! 

Another of the recent popular songs in 
France is also very significant — this one not 
for its words, but for its music. It is a song 
that I have already mentioned — Pcre la Vic- 
toire — first sung by Paulus at the Eldorado in 
the winter of 1891-92. The words are noth- 
ing — the revery of an old soldier — but the 
music, arranged by Louis Ganne for military 
bands, is in its way a wonderfully effective 
thing — a sort of cantata, whose meaning all 
France interpreted at once. It opens with a 
roll of drums and a trumpet-call, as heralding 



THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 189 

the military character of its motif. Then comes 
a long strain of melancholy music, sombre, pa- 
thetic, rising almost into a wail, though still 
marked by the military accent. To the listener 
it depicts France in her humiliation, beaten to 
her knees by the merciless invader, betrayed, 
despairing. Then, as the music almost dies 
away, the muffled drums roll steadily, and a 
firmer note is struck. France lives ! The years 
of patience, of sacrifice, of preparation have 
come. Stronger and clearer the music swells 
again into a noble march, majestic, confident, 
courageous. Clearer and bolder ring out the 
notes, faster and faster and richer and grander 
are the harmonies. France is once more her- 
self, puissant, girt for battle, invincible. The 
hour has struck, and a storm of drums over- 
whelms the ear in a great crash of martial 
melody, with the trumpets once more ringing 
out, this time exultant in the fierce joy of vic- 
tory ! It is the musical apotheosis of la re- 
vanche. Professional musicians may call it a 
poor thing ; but when rendered by a fine mili- 
tary band, as I have often heard it, it has al- 
ways seemed to me inexpressibly thrilling ; and 
with its hidden meanings it must quicken the 
pulse and stir the blood of every one who loves 
France and her chivalrous people. 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE- 
BOOKS 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE- 
BOOKS 

An ingenious person of great eminence in 
educational theory, but one whose patience is 
evidently more highly developed than his sense 
of humor, has been making some experiments 
that are supposed to be very important to scien- 
tific teachers. He has found that it takes a 
young child -j^j^ of a second to recognize the 
letter c, xV/o" °^ ^ second to recognize the let- 
ter a, and -^^^-^ of a second to recognize the 
letter t ; while the word c-a-t as a whole is 
recognized in yijW of a second. Therefore, 
he says, all primary teaching should be done 
by words and not by letters, and the words 
should be -^ of an inch high and printed in 
a line not more than four inches long. One 
doesn't see exactly how he has discovered all 
these things, but that does not matter ; for he 
is evidently a very profound person. I have 
done some figuring myself on the basis of his 
researches, and I find that, following out his 
13 



194 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

method and adopting his kind of reading-book, 
a child of five years, in an average daily les- 
son, would each day save yV^r °^ ^ minute 
out of its valuable time. Think of that ! 

This investigation is beautifully illustrative 
of what is going on to-day in the sphere of 
education. We are living in an age in which 
the Educator has been gradually supplanted 
by the Educationist. The Educator was a 
person who felt that every child has its own 
individual temperament and mental idiosyn- 
crasies which differentiate it to some extent 
from every other child, so that the method 
of presenting a subject should be largely influ- 
enced by the teacher's knowledge of the indi- 
vidual to be taught. He felt that a good 
teacher should be quick to note the effects 
upon each child's mind of a particular man- 
ner of presentation, and that the practical re- 
sults obtained should be the final test of every 
method, inasmuch as the education of the child 
and not the exaltation of the teacher was the 
end to be secured. Hence quick sympathy, 
keen perception, ready adaptability, and in- 
genuity in fixing the attention and interest- 
ing the thought of the child were regarded 
as the prime qualifications of a successful 
Educator. 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 195 

The Educationist has changed all that. So 
far as my own limited intelligence has been 
able to grasp the subtle distinction of mod- 
ern pa^dagogic doctrine, an Educationist is an 
individual who is not himself much of a hand 
at teaching, but who is able to tell all other 
persons how they ought to teach. He is great 
on method, and observes blandly, when ques- 
tioned, that it doesn't matter in the least 
whether the actual results amount to much 
so long as the correct psedagogic method has 
been employed. He abounds in statistics, and 
these statistics are usually in fractions. He 
perhaps could not himself succeed in teaching 
a young child to read, but, like the c-a-t inves- 
tigator, he can tell you just how many thou- 
sandths of a second it ought to take for some 
one else to make a letter perceptible to the 
child's intelligence. He has read several text- 
books on Psychology, and when he talks, he 
has a good deal to say about " concepts " and 
"apperception," and once in five minutes he 
will airily allude to the Laws of the Associa- 
tion of Ideas. He has, in fact, established a 
set of infallible formulas that never hang fire, 
and that render the education of children as 
simple a matter as rolling off a log. The ex- 
actness of these formulas is, indeed, a little 



196 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

startling to an ordinary mind. Thus, if the 
Educationist tells you that a child of twelve 
years and six months who is studying Latin 
must have exactly thirty-five minutes of reci- 
tation each day (preferably between nine and 
eleven o'clock), and you say doubtfully that 
you have been giving thirty minutes to this 
work between eleven and twelve o'clock, the 
Educationist will look at you with a pained 
surprise and tell you that you are evidently 
quite old fashioned. Then it would be wise 
to keep quiet unless you want to get into 
trouble ; for if you go on to say that your 
arrangement has worked very well, he will at 
once remark that you evidently know nothing 
of the Psychological Basis of Education ; and 
if you still persist, he will talk to you about 
Sturm, and Herbart, and maybe even Frcebel ; 
and if he once pulls Frcebel on you, you are 
gone. It is quite unsafe, too, for you to com- 
fort yourself with the thought that perhaps he 
doesn't know what he is talking about. You 
may think that he is by no means brilliant in 
his ordinary conversation, that he seems, in 
fact, in other matters to be rather dull ; and if 
you are exceptionally uninstructed and indis- 
creet, you may even go so far as to remark 
that he is evidently a good deal of an ass. 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 197 

But just wait, and Nemesis will at last get af- 
ter you. Some day or other you will see the 
Educationist reading a paper at a Teachers' 
Conference, and then you will know that he is 
really Great. 

Now, so far as we are personally concerned, 
we don't care how much he goes raiding around 
in the field of education, and we shouldn't say 
a word about him if he stopped right there. 
Children will tumble up somehow or other 
even under the rule of an Educationist ; and 
after all, the real training of every human be- 
ing comes largely from experience and from 
contact with his kind. Moreover, there is 
something to be said in behalf of the psycho- 
logical racket. In these days of overcrowded 
professions there are hundreds of shallow 
young men and rattle-pated young women 
who would have to carry a hod or go and get 
married if a wise dispensation of Providence 
had not specially opened up to them this new 
and fruitful field, wherein they can earn com- 
fortable salaries and much Kv8o<i without need- 
ing to possess anything more in the way of 
equipment than a few catchwords and the 
ability to keep a straight face when they hear 
each other talk. 

Unfortunately, however, these people have 



198 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

not remained contented with their original 
sphere of influence. Perhaps they are get- 
ting to be so numerous that they have begun 
to tread upon each other's heels. At any rate, 
they are now slopping over into another field, 
in which they are doing and will continue to 
do an infinite deal of harm. After grabbing 
the schools and coercing the teachers, they are 
now reaching out into the nursery and into 
the playground, and are seeking to upset all 
the good old traditions of child-life that have 
come down from the time when the Aryan 
children romped around on the borders of 
Volhynia. 

We can all remember the golden days of our 
early life, when no hard-and-fast line had yet 
been drawn for us between the real and the 
impossible, and when everything was wonder- 
ful because everything was new. That was 
the roseate time when we knew that at the 
base of every rainbow there lay buried a pot 
of real gold. We heard fairies whispering in 
the thickets of the woods, and could point out 
the hillocks where gnomes came up each night 
and gamboled in the moonlight. Then all of 
us dreamed rare dreams and cherished harm- 
lessly delightful fancies ; for the gray old world 
was very beautiful, and our lives were flushed 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 199 

with the Hght that dies away so soon. There 
were no Educationists in that paradise to which 
so many men and women, now grown grim and 
mirthless, sometimes look back with an un- 
wonted dimness of the eyes. But to-day ap- 
pears the brisk and practical Young Person of 
nineteen or thereabouts, fresh from a Training 
College and with no illusions and no sympa- 
thies about her. She bursts in upon the pene- 
tralia of childhood, and knocks its household 
gods to smithereens. Fairy stories ? Non- 
sense ! Giants? Bosh ! With a ruthless effi- 
ciency she annihilates the gentle friends of the 
child's imagination, deposes Santa Claus, mocks 
at the virtues of the Wishbone, and drives with 
jeers the Sand Man out of existence. Then she 
gets down to work and trots out her own sub- 
stitutes for all these things. The children must 
begin to absorb some scraps of history ; they 
must draw geometrical figures instead of rings 
for "■ migs." No more singing at their play of 
the disaster that befell London Bridge, or of 
the Farmer who stamps his foot and claps 
his hands and turns around to view the land. 
" Eeny-meeny-mony-mike " is silly gibber- 
ish. " Monkey, monkey, barrel of beer " is 
low. None of this for the wise young lady 
who now runs things ! She will teach her 



200 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

flock some real instructive and improving 
songs, about minerals, for instance, and when 
she takes them out to walk she will make 
them peep and botanize with her in a way to 
give Linnaeus myelitis. Then the little things, 
instead of playing around in God's free air and 
in a healthily unconscious way, are thrust into 
a kindergarten, where they sit and make worst- 
ed parallelograms on a piece of cardboard, and 
learn a sort of complicated drill that keeps them 
unnaturally alert ; while through the whole per- 
formance they are watched and egged on to em- 
ulation until their little faces flush and all their 
sensitive little nerves are tingling with unhealthy 
excitement. They learn some things ; but what 
they learn is valueless, while what they lose in 
learning it is beyond all price. At times, per- 
haps, some mother whose mind is troubled by 
these new works and ways will timidly suggest 
her doubts about the wisdom of it all ; but the 
brisk Young Person will promptly and rather 
patronizingly inform her that it rests upon a 
Psychological Basis, and that it is just what 
Frcebel meant. And so we see growing up 
about us a generation of shrill, self-conscious, 
and insufferably priggish brats. 

This strain of thought is always started by 
the sight of the children's picture-books that 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 20I 

every year load down the counters of the book- 
shops in anticipation of the hoHdays ; for the 
Educationist has not yet aboHshed Christmas, 
probably because he requires a short vacation 
himself, in which he can go off somewhere and 
think. But he has done what he could by issu- 
ing a ukase (which has probably a Psychologi- 
cal Basis, too) as to the sort of picture-books 
that children should be allowed to see. No 
more of those demoralizing and quite absurd 
old stories of which both text and pictures have 
wrought such a havoc in the past ! Why, they 
can be proved to be filled with falsehood. Take 
the pernicious tale called Jack and the Bean- 
stalk. Everybody knows that beans could 
never grow to such a height as this story rep- 
resents, nor if they did, would human life be 
possible at such an altitude. And as for the 
Giant — why, it is a well-known anthropologi- 
cal fact that there are no giants. See Quatre- 
fages and Schwartz. Then the story goes on 
to speak of a talking harp and a hen that lays 
golden eggs. What glaring improbabilities ! 
An inanimate object like a harp cannot pos- 
sibly possess phonological attributes ; auto- 
matic sounds of any kind would be out of the 
question. And as for the hen — no treatise on 
ornithology ever includes among the ova of 



2 02 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

gallinaceous bipeds any such phenomenon. In 
a word, these things being easily demonstrated 
to be absolutely false and without any founda- 
tion in foct, will any one seriously advise that 
children should be allowed to hear of them ? 
Would you have them grow up to manhood 
and womanhood believing in magic beans, and 
talking harps, and giants? The thing is pedae- 
gogically unsound and psychologically mon- 
strous ! No ! if children must have anything 
so frivolous as a picture-book for mere amuse- 
ment (a thing to be deplored), let them at least 
have books that may indirectly familiarize them 
with the world as it is, and not with unrealities 
like talking harps and aureous eggs. Let us 
through the eye give them some knowledge of 
zoological truths, and let these be depicted in 
a way to soothe and to tranquillize rather than 
to stimulate an unhealthy imagination. Final- 
ly, these picture-books in primary colors are 
wholly inartistic, and check the sesthetic de- 
velopment of a child's mind. Give us rather 
drawings in delicate outline and permeated by 
the influence of Art. 

These notions have gradually been instilled 
into the minds of fathers and mothers, and 
have finally filtered through to the minds of 
publishers as well, so that at last one finds 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 203 

everywhere the sort of picture-book for which 
the Educationist cries out. They are roughly 
to be divided into two classes — the animal 
picture-book and the purely artistic picture- 
book. 

The animal picture-book is not a picture- 
book of the old kind, in which animals are the 
protagonists of tragedies and comedies. There 
is no story in the new picture-book, but just 
animals — principally cows. One doesn't quite 
see how it is that cows are supposed to be most 
fitted for the contemplation of the New Child. 
Perhaps the calm of the cow, her unimagina- 
tive turn of mind, and her thoughtful nature 
make her psychologically safe ; but anyhow 
there she is, occupying whole pages of a hun- 
dred picture-books. First you see the cow in 
the foreground gazing in profile over a fence; 
then you see the same cow in the middle dis- 
tance looking around for something to eat ; 
last you see the cow in the background with 
her hind legs carefully foreshortened and do- 
ing nothing in particular. Toiijours cow. The 
drawing is very carefully done ; the cow's dd- 
aroscuro is excellent. The disposition of the 
tail is always carefully thought out with refer- 
ence to the general scheme of composition. 
But the Old Child would want to know what 



204 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

it all meant ; and when told that it had no 
meaning, no insidious story, he would have 
thought that there was just a little too much 
cow ; and the perfection of the chiaroscuro 
would not wholly fill the void caused by the 
absence of meaning and of story. What the 
New Child thinks of it I personally do not 
know. 

Next to the cow, the pig is greatly favored 
by the makers of these picture-books. Now 
the pig is all right. He has played an honor- 
able and even an exciting part in the child's 
books of the past, from the Little Pig who 
went to market to the other Little Pig who 
built him a house out of straw against which 
the Wolf huffed and puffed till he blew it 
down ; and the far more fortunate Little Pig 
who fooled the Wolf and finally scalded him 
to death in a big kettle. But the latter-day 
pig is not a pig of that kind. He is just a plain 
pig with no mind, a pig who has had no advent- 
ures, a pig about whose life there is no dark 
mystery, no tragedy, and no triumph — in fact, 
an ordinary pig with as little imagination as an 
Educationist. 

The purely artistic picture-book is different 
in subject. Its style of picture is very well ex- 
emplified in the designs which that very clever 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 205 

artist, Miss Ethel Reed, occasionally draws for 
children's books. Miss Reed's designs usually 
show a female face sometimes looking to the 
right and sometimes looking to the left and 
sometimes looking at the reader. There is a 
flurry of buds and leaves and butterflies and 
other small hors d'oeiivres gracefully disposed 
about the figure, and that is all. It is very ar- 
tistic and daintily drawn ; but again the Old 
Child would ask, " What is it all about ?" And 
the answer would have to be that it isn't about 
anything. The present writer received rather 
a shock the other day when he spoke to a friend 
about this matter, and said that he thought that 
a child could hardly find much to interest him 
in such drawings as those of Miss Reed. 

" Why," cried my friend, " you're entirely 
mistaken! My little girl is so fascinated by 
these pictures that she carries the book to 
bed with her at night !" 

Here was a blow that made me gasp. No 
one likes to have his theories upset in this way. 

" Yes," he went on, " she looks at them by 
the hour, and insists on my making up a story 
about each one." 

• O Veritas sanctissivia! Here was confirma- 
tion strong as holy writ ! So the New Child 
is not so very different from the Old Child, 



2o6 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

after all. The Story is still the thing, and all 
that the Educationist has yet accomplished is 
to throw the burden of providing it on the par- 
ent instead of on the author ! 

It is in this latter fact tliat one descries some 
hope of ultimately returning sanity. When the 
overworked parent begins to realize that the 
child is going to have the story just the same 
as ever, he will also begin to reflect that it 
might just as well be told in the book as ex- 
tracted from his own inexperienced fancy ; 
that Nature is still a good deal stronger than 
Art ; that though the Educationist may tem- 
porarily pitch her out with a psychological 
dung-fork, she will steal in again through the 
back door as irrepressible as ever ; and that, 
granting the necessity of the Story, there will 
never be any stories like those fine old tales 
that have defied the tooth of time and will 
defy the dogmas even of the all -wise Educa- 
tionist. Then will Jack the Giant Killer stand 
forth once more in his great nursery epic ; and 
Little Red Riding Hood, whose story has all 
the subtle elements of a Greek drama, will 
come again into her own ; and Blue Beard 
will be heard still thundering at the foot of 
the tower while Sister Anne waves her signal 
to the rescuers. 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 207 

One argument against these books deserves 
some little serious consideration, because, on 
the face of it, it is not devoid of plausibility. 
It is asserted that the scenes of killing and 
wounding and battle and slaughter in which 
some of them abound are unduly horrifying to 
the sensitive mind of a child ; that they will 
frighten and excite and alarm, and are there- 
fore unwholesome in their effect upon the 
mind and nerves. But this assertion only goes 
to show how little, with all his vaunted psy- 
chology, the Educationist really knows about 
the nature of a child's mind. He ascribes to 
the child, in fact, attributes that are impossi- 
ble without an experience which no child can 
possibly possess. Thus, for example, when you 
tell the Educationist how Jack drew his sword 
and decapitated the Two Headed Giant, "he, 
being a grown man with a knowledge of physi- 
ological facts, can conjure up the horrors of an 
actual killing — the gushing blood, the shriek 
of agony, the monstrous body swaying and 
falling, and the inevitableness and finality of 
death. But what does the child know of all 
this ? To it the cutting off of the head is 
not in itself more startling than the taking off 
of a hat. Of course, it is rather uncomfortable 
for a Giant to be without any head ; but he is 



2o8 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

a bad old Giant anyway and deserves some 
little annoyance of this sort for stealing the 
poor people's pigs and cattle. If he should 
repent, however, there is no reason why his 
head should not be clapped on again all right 
and be as good as new, just as when the Maid 
was in the Garden hanging out the Clothes 
and her nose was carried off by a predatory 
blackbird, it wasn't long before little Jenny 
Wren came and satisfactorily replaced it. To 
the child's simple faith everything is possible ; 
it knows as little of anatomy as of antiseptic 
surgery ; and its imagination, however active 
and daring, is necessarily circumscribed and 
conditioned by the limitations of its knowl- 
edge. Consequently, just as young David 
Copperfield read of Tom Jones and Humph- 
rey Clinker and found them harmless creat- 
ures because his own mind had not yet 
eaten of the tree of life that gives a knowl- 
edge of good and evil, so to the child in the 
nursery, the combats and wild scenes of the 
story-book are as innocent as summer picnics. 
It is perhaps permissible to think that when 
the present fad for over-refining the processes 
of children's education has been dropped, when 
the Psychological Basis has been laid comfort- 
ably to rest, and when we all go back to a 



THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 209 

simpler and more natural way of looking at 
these things, the child's picture-book will be 
found to have been modified in only one re- 
spect by reason of this pow-wow. It is likely 
that the pictures themselves, while keeping to 
the old themes, or to themes that are not differ- 
ent in general spirit, will be more artistic in 
their execution, and that is all. Then we shall 
have a quite ideal picture-book — one whose 
illustrations will suggest the story that lies 
behind them, and at the same time will de- 
serve respect for the adequacy of their execu- 
tion. 

There must be in the ideal illustrative im- 
agination and insight, originality and felicity 
of execution ; and there should also be a sub- 
tle touch of humor unobtrusively suggested — 
the sort of underlying humor always present 
in a child's mind when it is playing robbers, 
for instance, or anything else that is purely 
make-believe, and which is quite consistent 
with the greatest external gravity and appar- 
ent faith in the little drama. It is, in fact, the 
sub-consciousness of the fiction as a fiction, the 
duality of the thought, the underlying knowl- 
edge that the play is really nothing but a 
play, that so tickles a child's fancy and gives 
to the whole thing its greatest zest. Hence 
14 



2IO THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 

the ideal pictures for a child will always man- 
age to suggest this very feeling, will make you 
know that the artist is himself within the 
charmed circle, that he is playing with the 
children and making believe as hard as they 
are ; and all the while you must be conscious 
that his eyes, like theirs, have just a glint of 
fun in them, just the suspicion of a twinkle 
that shows how well he understands the rules 
of the game. Moreover, each picture must in- 
evitably make you feel that there is a story 
behind it, and must excite in the mind of the 
child who sees it a strong desire to know just 
what that story is. 

Let us live, therefore, in the hope that ere 
long there will come to children a glorious 
Renaissance of the Natural, when they will no 
more be fed with formulas and made to learn 
so many improving things. Childhood is short 
enough at the very best ; the dreams of chil- 
dren vanish all too soon ; the facts of life con- 
front them grimly even while the baby look 
still lingers in their eyes ; and surely he is no 
real lover of his kind who would begrudge 
them this one small corner of delight and enter 
in with sullen tread to mar the heaven that lies 
about us in our infancy. 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

The Venezuelan complication of a year ago 
quite naturally called forth a swarm of articles 
in the newspapers and in the magazines. In 
this country such published discussion was, in 
general, pretty closely confined to the merits 
of the question immediately at issue, but in 
England it took a much wider range, and ap- 
peared to centre very largely around the gen- 
eral subject of American feeling towards Eng- 
land, as to which the English seem of late to 
feel an unusual curiosity. For many weeks it 
was impossible to take up an English peri- 
odical without finding either an elaborate ar- 
ticle or at least a long paragraph devoted to 
more or less exoteric speculation upon this 
rather interesting topic. The writers in every 
case, however, were Englishmen, and, in con- 
sequence, no very satisfactory and convincing 
analysis appeared ; for the subject is one with 
which no Englishman, from the nature of the 
case, is competent to deal, because such knowl- 



214 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

edge as Englishmen possess, or think they pos- 
sess, is necessarily derived from their reading 
of our newspapers or from their own very su- 
perficial acquaintance with a very limited por- 
tion of our population. Even Mr. Goldwin 
Smith, who has spent a good portion of his 
life in and near the United States, cannot be 
accepted as a safe guide ; for while he doubtless 
knows many Americans, and has heard and 
read much that is published here, he cannot 
have come closely into contact with the great 
mass of the American people, with whose point 
of view alone this discussion has to do. The 
real feeHng of a nation, especially of a nation 
like our own, is not to be gleaned from the 
highly - colored pronouncements of a sensa- 
tional press, nor, on the other hand, from the 
after-dinner chat of a tactful and hospitable en- 
tertainer, who for the moment lets his person- 
al liking for a distinguished guest inspire him 
with a purely cenatory cordiality towards the 
nation whom that guest for the moment typi- 
fies. Hence it is that whatever has been pub- 
lished in England gives only an outsider's view, 
which is hostile or friendly, according to the 
writer's own limited and personal observations, 
and in many cases, also, according to the spirit 
in which his investisfation has been conducted. 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 215 

Two letters, however, published in two Eng- 
lish journals are really worth remembering. 
Each very fairly represents one of the two 
general opinions held in England of Amer- 
ica and American sentiment, and, taken to- 
gether, they may serve as a text for the con- 
sideration of a very interesting question. 

The first is a letter written to the London 
Times by Dr. Conan Doyle. Dr. Doyle has 
lately visited the United States. He has met 
many Americans, both in public and in the 
apparently confidential intercourse of private 
life, and he doubtless thinks that he is very 
well qualified to expound the national senti- 
ment of our people towards his own country. 
Dr. Doyle believes that there is a good deal of 
hostility towards England, though not towards 
Englishmen ; and he regards this feeling as aC 
sort of tradition, an historic survival from the 
past, and not as anything very definite, very 
specific, or very reasonable. He points out 
that in American schools the portions of Amer- 
can history most carefully studied are those 
that treat of our two great struggles with Eng- 
land, and he expresses the opinion that by con- 
.tinually dwelling upon the events of the Revo- 
lutionary War and of the War of 1812 Ameri- 
can youth are trained up to regard England as 



2l6 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

a sort of hereditary foe, towards whom it is both 
proper and patriotic to express and actually to 
feel a certain amount of rather vague hostility 
which could not, however, be justified by the 
facts of the present day. Dr. Doyle is good 
enough himself to speak with much friendliness 
of the American people, and to express his be- 
lief that such bitterness as survives from the 
past will die away as the two nations grow 
more and more to realize their community of 
interest, and to know each other better. In 
short, his view is that of the modern Liberal — 
well meaning, anxious to be just and fair, and 
fully convinced that he is perfectly familiar 
with all sides of a by no means complicated 
question. 

The other letter appeared in the Saturday 
Review and bore the signature of Mr. Morley 
Roberts, a rather obscure young English writ- 
er. This document is considerably shorter 
than Dr. Doyle's and far more snappy in its 
diction. It was called forth primarily by the 
appeal of the English authors to their Ameri- 
can brethren — an appeal which Mr. Roberts 
very indignantly repudiates. Having done this, 
he goes on to set forth some notions of his own. 
He regards Americans as distinctly and bitter- 
ly hostile to England and to Englishmen. He 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 217 

asserts that wc are " rancorous," and he very 
frankly says that this feehng is most heartily 
reciprocated in England. The concluding par- 
agraphs of his letter deserve to be quoted in 
full: 

" No Englishman with imperial instincts can loolc 
with anything but contempt on the Monroe Doctrine. 
The English, and not the inhabitants of the United 
States, are the greatest power in the two Americas; 
and no dog of a Republic can open its mouth to bark 
without our good leave. Personally, I look forward 
to a time when a social and political revolt shall tear 
the heterogeneous plutocratic fabric of the States to 
fragments, and then the more truly democratic Eng- 
land may come by her heritage. 

" Those who sign this precious paper go on to say 
that we are proud of the United States. Sir, we might 
be proud of them ; but to say that we are proud of 
them is to speak most disingenuously. Who can be 
proud of a politically corrupt and financially rotten 
country, with no more than a poor minority vainly 
striving for health ? . . . 

" If literature is the only bond between us and this 
most ill-mannered country, it may be time for us to 
repudiate American copyright before the Americans 
repudiate it. But literature is no real bond, because 
not one American in a thousand — no, not one in ten 
thousand — has had his manners made less brutal by 
'the most casual acquaintance with it. For these rea- 
sons I wish to dissociate myself from an appeal to any 
country, and more particularly to the United States." 



2l8 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

Mr. Roberts's delightfully frank and evi- 
dently honest letter represents the deliberate 
opinion of the High Tory, and one that is 
held in its extreme form by many English- 
men who are not Tories. In a less degree, I 
think, it is held also by a majority, if not of 
all Englishmen, at least of all the Englishmen 
who count. 

Both the views expressed in these letters are 
clearly wrong — Dr. Doyle's because it mistakes 
both the cause and the direction of such un- 
friendly sentiment towards England as exists 
in the United States ; and Mr. Roberts's, be- 
cause it so immensely exaggerates the extent 
and nature of that sentiment. It is not true, 
as Dr. Doyle thinks, that Americans still cher- 
ish any feeling that was an inheritance from 
our early struggles with England. What he 
says would have seemed reasonable in the for- 
ties, when, as Mr. Howells has narrated in 
his Boy's Town, the American school-boy was 
taught to regard the "Bridish" as a blood- 
thirsty and relentless foe, to be classed with 
the devil and all his works. There were many 
men then living who had a keen personal rec- 
ollection of the massacres at Tappan and in 
the Wyoming Valley, who had themselves ex- 
perienced the loathsome horrors of the Eng- 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 219 

lish prison-ships, or had later seen the nation's 
Capitol in flames. But that generation has 
now passed away, and with them the reality 
of these experiences. Americans are not much 
given to living in the past ; and if they now 
recall the memory of these two wars, it is be- 
cause they regard them as picturesque epi- 
sodes in our national histor}^ and not at all 
because the recollection feeds fat an ancient 
grudge. In fact, we can all now contemplate 
the records of 1776 and 1812 with a good deal 
of complacency ; for in the first war the colo- 
nies distinctly triumphed over the mother 
country, while the second conflict ended in 
the tacit abandonment by England of the 
right of search whose enforcement had brought 
about the struggle. 

It is a pity, then, that no adequate expres- 
sion of American feeling towards England has 
yet been written down by an American, be- 
cause such an utterance would greatly enlight- 
en the English mind in its present condition 
of uncertainty, and would be valuable also as 
a corrective to much of the loose talk that is 
heard in this country on the political stump 
and in the columns of the political news- 
paper. 

What is the real feeling that Americans en- 



220 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

tertain towards England ? And when we say 
Americans, we do not, on the one hand, mean 
the poHticians, who are mere reeds shaken by 
the wind, and who study the popular feeling 
so intently as to lose all sense of perspective, 
and therefore fail to see the wood by reason 
of the trees. .Nor do we mean those persons 
who are Americans by act of the courts rather 
than by right of birth — Americans upon whose 
papers of naturalization the ink is scarcely dry, 
and in whom still smoulders the memory of 
Old World feuds. And, on the other hand, 
one does not mean those despicable curs of 
native birth, who may be heard from time to 
time yelping at their country in foreign clubs 
and the smoking-rooms of transatlantic steam- 
ers, and who are thrilled with delight down 
to the very depths of their infinitesimal little 
souls when some fatuous foreigner tells them 
that he " really would never have taken them 
to be Americans!" We mean, rather, that 
great silent mass of our countrymen whose 
nationality is inherited from many generations 
of Anglo - Saxon ancestors, and who have 
learned their Americanism at their father's 
fireside and not from the scare-heads of a 
newspaper — men who have no political ambi- 
tions up their sleeve, and who do not rush 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 22 1 

into print, but who stand for sobriety and 
sense, and whose matured opinion, in the loncj 
run, makes and unmakes Presidents and Sen- 
ates, and bends the government's whole pol- 
icy to its silent will. How do these men feel 
towards England, the home of their race and 
the source of the great stream of our national 
traditions? 

It is told of Charles Dickens, that on his sec- 
ond visit to this country he fell into conversa- 
tion with an American upon this very subject ; 
and finally, with that peculiar sort of tact which 
so many Englishmen possess, he remarked : 

" Oh, as far as we are concerned, it's perfectly 
simple, you know. We all of us love Ameri- 
cans, but we hate America." 

To which the American is said to have re- 
plied, rather slowly : 

"Well, with us it's just the other way: we 
all of us love England — but we hate English- 
men." 

There is a great deal of truth packed away 
in this sentence, though it needs a certain 
amount of exegetical commentary which is 
perhaps most easily conveyed in an allegori- 
cal form. The English nation is a good deal 
like the elder brother in the regulation British 
novel, who in due time, by right of primogeni- 



2 22 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

ture, succeeds to the ancestral estates and the 
family mansion. We Americans, on the other 
hand, represent the younger brother who in- 
herits nothing, and who if he remains at home 
must do so as the mere dependent of the heir. 
The old home is very dear to him. It has al- 
ways been his home as truly as his brother's. 
He knows every nook and corner of the park, 
every tree in the woodlands, every leaf of the 
lustrous ivy on the towers. To leave it all is 
inexpressibly hard. Yet he is not of a stock 
that takes kindly to dependence; and so at 
last he tears himself away with a hearty good- 
bye to his brother, and the suspicion of a tear 
in his eye for the old days that are over ; and 
going out into a new land in a new world, he 
begins the fight for fortune. He battles with the 
forces of nature, and overcomes them ; he sub- 
dues the forest, the wild beast, and the savage, 
and makes a new home for himself by his in- 
domitable energy and courage and persever- 
ance. Years go on, and at last he hews out 
a fortune also. Everything prospers, and he 
grows richer and richer, until finally his wildest 
dreams are realized ; and then his first thought 
is once more to visit the home of his childhood. 
He crosses the sea, a man strong and success- 
ful, one who has lived the large, free life of the 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 223 

New World, and he hurries along over the well- 
known roads with a heart full of generous emo- 
tion, dreaming in his sirpplicity of a royal wel- 
come from the brother whom he left behind so 
long ago, and towards whom his very soul goes 
out in his love for home and kindred. And 
when at last he rushes into his presence with all 
this pent-up enthusiasm ready to overflow, and 
with the breezy breath of a thousand leagues 
of sea about him, he finds the brother whom 
he had so longed for, a stiff, smug, decorous, 
and frigid person, who looks him over a little 
curiously, who gives him a couple of fingers to 
shake, and who asks him in rather a languid 
way whether he is going to stay all night ! 
The enthusiasm is killed in an instant ; and 
when he finds that his elder regards him with 
a certain supercilious disdain, as one who has 
evidently lost, in the outlandish countries 
where he has lived, all traces of his early 
breeding — one whose very success has made 
him a little vulgar — then perhaps the younger 
brother swears a little to himself, and would 
rather like to punch the other's head. But he 
never quite forgets the tie between them, and 
if his elder were in need, or if some stranger 
were to attack him, all these private griev- 
ances would be put away in an instant, and he 



224 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

would stand by the head of his house with both 
purse and power to the very last extremity. 

And this is about the way it is with the Amer- 
ican. He loves England with a fervor and a 
passion of which no Englishman has any con- 
ception. It means to his consciousness far 
more than it can mean to any Englishman. 
When he visits it his whole heart leaps at the 
first sight of the poppy-sprinkled meadows and 
the ivied walls of its sleepy old towns. It is 
his home ; its history is his history ; its glory 
is his glory too. But the people — that is an- 
other matter. It is not the memory of old- 
time wars that affects him. For these he cares 
no more than for the First Crusade. No Anglo- 
Saxon ever bears malice towards a former op- 
ponent in a good, square, stand-up fight. But 
when he finds his kindred in the old home 
looking at him with a sort of tolerant con- 
tempt, when he notes the ostentatious conde- 
scension of their manner, and the absurd as- 
sumption of superiority that is theirs, then he 
begins to think of things that happened in his 
own recollection ; and when he does so think 
of them he waxes hot. He recalls how in the 
darkest period of our Civil War the English 
statesmen who had once posed as the friends 
of the United States c^reeted the news of our 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 225 

disasters with mingled cheers and sneers ; how 
they set their names to the Hst of those who 
pledged great sums of money to the support 
of our opponents ; how amid bland assurances 
of ignorance they let slip from English ports 
the privateers that swept our vessels from the 
sea ; how, when English ships were anchored 
beside our ships of war in neutral harbors their 
crews made night hideous with their insulting 
songs and cheers for the national enemy ; how 
a great noble like Lord Hartington ostenta- 
tiously displayed a Confederate emblem at a 
gathering in New York, where he had been 
welcomed as a guest ; how in a thousand ways 
the representatives of England gloated over 
our misfortunes and mocked at our successes. 
And if the American be a Southerner his feel- 
ing is not very different, for he knows now 
what he did not at the time so clearly see : 
that English sympathy with the South was 
wholly selfish and self-seeking ; that it waned 
and died when the cause of the Confederacy 
grew hopeless ; and that its only source was 
the desire to discredit and destroy the great 
Republic whose existence was a perpetual re- 
proach to the pig-headed folly of an English 
king. 

Yet it is probably not these public acts of 
15 



226 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

avowed ill-wishers that have most irritated 
American sentiment against Englishmen ; it 
is rather the half-unconscious, blundering way 
in which the average Briton contrives, even in 
his clumsy attempts at civility, to reveal a 
mental attitude that reflects dislike and differ- 
entiation — an attitude which puts Americans 
into the place of " poor relations " to be asked, 
so to speak, to warmed-over dinners and the 
hashed mutton of courtesy ; or that prompts 
him, when he visits this side of the Atlantic, 
to appear at an evening reception in a tweed 
suit. An anecdote told by General Badeau of 
President Grant's visit to England will illus- 
trate our meaning : 

"At one manufacturing town he (General Grant) 
stayed at a house where every honor was paid him 
and every courtesy extended. But his hosts took 
him to visit the steward of a lord who lived near by. 
He was permitted to see the state apartments in the 
absence of his lordship, and he lunched in the land- 
steward's room and not in the earl's. The steward 
was probably an abler and better educated man than 
his master, and General Grant was too good a demo- 
crat not to appreciate this fact and to respect his 
host ; but if he had been an English nobleman neither 
steward nor manufacturer would have dreamed of 
entertaining him." 

This was a trifling incident in itself, but it is 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 227 

beautifully illustrative of the way in which the 
Englishman turns even his hospitality into a 
discourtesy by making it accentuate the low 
esteem in which he holds his guest. 

There are times when even the most une- 
motional American who calls to mind such 
things as these, and who reads perhaps some 
bit of coarse abuse like that of Mr. Morley 
Roberts — there are times, I say, when he 
would exult in shouldering a rifle for a march 
over the Canadian frontier, and when he would 
see with joy the humiliation of England at the 
hand of the United States. Yet there never 
has come a time when he would wish to see 
that humiliation inflicted by any other hands. 
He would perhaps welcome a struggle, but it 
must be, so to speak, a purely family affair for 
the clearing up of scores that affect no other 
people — an affair to be settled by a fine piece 
of give-and-take fighting, with no ill-feeling as 
an aftermath. Whenever a foreign power at- 
tempts to put an affront on England, as the 
insolent young cub of a German Kaiser lately 
tried to do, the American feels as though he, 
too, had received a slap full in the face. And 
then, when the news is flashed across the sea 
that his English kinsmen have risen to resent 
the insult, united and unflinching in the face 



228 AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 

of danger ; when he hears that fleets are mo- 
bihzed and that troops are rallying to their 
colors with the splendid efficiency that is the 
attribute of England in the hour of danger, 
then his whole heart goes out to them in a 
thrill of sympathy, and, putting aside the rec- 
ollection of his former grievances, he would 
rather like to take a shot on his own account 
at the enemy whom, for the time being, he 
regards as an enemy of the entire race. 

This, I think, is a fair expression of Ameri- 
can sentiment towards England — a curious 
mingling of pride in the ancestral home with 
a very real dislike for much that Englishmen 
have done and are still doing. And this view 
of the case is one to be commended to the very 
careful consideration of the English ; for it rests 
with them to say which of these two feelings 
shall in the end dominate and at last obliter- 
ate the other. Should they go on exercising 
their peculiar gift of making enemies, the hour 
for repentance may come and come too late. 
Some day, perhaps, when the meteor flag shall 
have been dimmed for the first time by the 
shadow of a great defeat, when the Battle of 
Dorking shall have been actually fought, and 
when the spiked helmets are swarming over 
the downs of Surrey in irresistible conver- 



AMERICAN FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND 229 

geiice upon undefended London, even the 
most self-satisfied Englishmen may regret 
that of their own deliberate choice they killed 
in the hearts of the American people a feeling 
which to-day still lives, and which tells us that 
the prosperity and the greatness and the honor 
of England are in no small degree our own in- 
heritance. 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

With his retirement from the supreme ex- 
ecutive ofifice Mr. Cleveland's public life may 
be regarded as deSnitely ended. Our tradi- 
tional and quite indefensible system, which 
gives no official rank to an ex -President, and 
therefore deprives the nation of the exception- 
al experience and the exceptionally impartial 
counsel of him who has passed through the 
great ordeal of administering the mightiest 
popular government known to the modern 
world, imposes upon Mr. Cleveland, as upon 
his predecessors, the dignified yet unfruitful 
f obscurity of private station ; for with scarcely 
an exception, our American Presidents have 
felt that they owed it to the majesty of the 
office that was once their own, to listen to no 
ordinary call of public service, and to hold 
aloof from all the din and uproar of party 
strife. In consequence, Mr. Cleveland already 
belongs to history ; and even now the attempt 
is being made to assign to him and to his ad- 



234 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

ministration their proper place in the annals of 
the American Republic. 

That such an attempt is absurdly premature 
is so obvious as to need no argument. With 
the passion of partisanship still strong in the 
minds alike of those who fought against him 
and of those who battled with him, the sense 
of true historical perspective cannot possibly 
exist to-day ; and with the echoes of a great 
political battle still reverberating in the ear, 
no one can hear as yet the calm, clear voice 
that ultimately stills all others as it pronounces 
the final verdict of a nation's history. 

But though it is too soon to weigh the poli- 
cies and to judge the measures that are now 
inseparably linked with the story of Mr. Cleve- 
land's public life, or to pretend to know how 
beneficial or how harmful is to be their influ- 
ence upon the political welfare of the Ameri- 
can people, it is, nevertheless, perhaps by no 
means an impossible task for one outside the 
range of purely partisan activity to form some 
sort of tentative opinion of the man himself as 
an administrator and as a party leader; for, 
putting aside the merits of the ends that he 
has aimed to reach, the manner in which he 
has pursued them is wholly a matter of re- 
corded fact, and in no respect a matter of 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 235 

opinion ; and it surely may even now be 
viewed with reasonable impartiality as a very 
interesting political and personal study. 

For some cause or other, Americans have 
always found a peculiar pleasure in dwelling 
upon the striking contrasts that are so abun- 
dant in the lives of their public men. To re- 
call in the presence of a stately Senator the 
fact that he was once a bobbin-boy ; to see in 
the victorious general a whilom tanner or gro- 
cer's clerk ; and to look back of the President 
seated in the simple chair that serves him as a 
very real throne from which to direct the des- 
tinies of seventy millions of people, and re- 
member the rail-splitter or canal-boatman of 
twenty or thirty years ago, seems to titillate 
agreeably a certain almost universal instinct. 
Perhaps this feeling is a part of the national 
irreverence ; or perhaps it is only a manifesta- 
tion of the national sense of humor which finds 
an especial piquancy in vivid contrasts ; or per- 
haps again, at bottom, it rests in some subtle 
way upon an intensely American admiration 
for the nerve, the capacity, and the '* gump- 
tion " that enable some men to fight their way 
up from obscurity against tremendous odds 
and to wrest a brilliant success from the re- 
luctant hand of Destiny, However this may 



236 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

be, the career of Mr. Cleveland is perhaps more 
full of startling contrasts, of striking anoma- 
lies, and of unexpected paradoxes, than can be 
found in the history of any other of our Presi- 
dents. No American in public life has ever 
experienced more rapid and astonishing turns 
of fortune ; no man has raised and faced and 
fought so many deep-rooted political and per- 
sonal prejudices ; no man has broken through 
so many thoroughly established political tra- 
ditions. 

Of all our American Presidents there are 
four who stand out conspicuously above the 
rest as representing four distinct types, each 
very characteristic and very national, and each 
differing essentially from the other three. In 
Washington we see the highest type of the 
colonial American, developed wholly under 
the influence of English traditions. Wash- 
ington is, in fact, in his tone and temper, his 
point of view and his ideals, the representative 
upon American soil of the English gentleman 
and statesman, though with a difference that 
makes him an fond entirely American ; and his 
immediate successors in the Presidency did not 
very far depart from the standards that were 
his. Even Jefferson, with all his radicalism, 
must be grouped in the same class, for, as is 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 237 

the case with most Americans, his radicalism, 
startHng as it seemed to the Federalists of his 
time, was only superficial ; and when one thinks 
of him as strolling through the stately halls 
of Monticelloj a landed proprietor, his cellars 
stored with rare old wines, his library filled 
with the choicest books, patronizing the arts 
and sciences, and having his wants supplied 
by a retinue of slaves, he is readily seen to 
have been the true patrician whose democracy 
was in large part an intellectual assumption, 
just as the political theories of the great Whig 
dukes in England are found, upon analysis, to 
differ in no fundamental point from the conserv- 
atism of the Tory magnates. Jackson was the 
first New Man to arise in our government's his- 
tory ; and he represents the rough frontiersman, 
the fighter, the man who faced both nature and 
the savage in a successful battle for the mastery 
of the West. His election marks an epoch in our 
history, a break in the traditions that bound us 
closely to English influence ; and he is the first 
of the American Presidents to stand firmly 
and almost fiercely upon the rock of national 
individuality. Lincoln, again, is still another 
type — the type of the Western provincial, a 
later growth than the frontiersman, with some 
of the frontiersman's traits, but more subtle, 



238 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

more open to new influences, more closely in 
touch with the resources of an older civiliza- 
tion, much more a man of thought and some- 
what less a man of action. 

Mr. Cleveland, when he first became known 
to the nation at the time of his candidacy for 
the governorship of New York in 1882, typified 
a fourth and a still different kind of personality. 
In him was seen the modern American who 
lives in cities and represents a stratum of the 
population that is every year becoming more 
and more numerous with the increase of the 
urban element. He was a type of the practical, 
every-day, usual citizen of moderate means and 
no very marked ambitions — a blend of the 
business man and the small professional per- 
son, one who knocks about with his fellows in 
a give-and-take sort of way, blunt, hard-headed, 
having a good digestion and a brusque, unim- 
aginative readiness to take a hand in whatever 
is going on. His education was of the sim- 
plest, his general information and reading pre- 
sumably of the scantiest, and his interest in 
life was pretty nearly bounded by the limits 
of the city of Buffalo. As a practising lawyer 
he appeared in the local courts, and, though 
well thought of by his fellow- lawyers, and 
though at times intrusted with the conduct 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 239 

of cases of considerable importance, he was 
not known beyond the local circuit. A bach- 
elor, he had no need of a large income. His 
spare time was spent with cronies of his own 
kind. His recreation was derived largely from 
the intricacies of the game of pinochle, played 
in the comfortable back room of a beer-garden ; 
and perhaps this circumstance is in itself enough 
to give a fair idea of his general environment. 
When the eventful convention was held that 
nominated him for the governorship, Mr. Cleve- 
land took charge of his own canvass in person, 
sitting all through the sultry summer day in 
a small bedroom of his hotel, with a tub of 
cracked ice and innumerable bottles beside 
him, conferring with his cronies, receiving vis- 
its from country delegates, and by a sort of 
professional joviality bidding for the favor of 
that interesting class of politicians whom his 
chief advocate in recent years has generically 
described as Boys. 

Elected Governor by an unprecedented ma- 
jority, owing to bitter dissensions in the oppos- 
ing party, Mr. Cleveland entered upon a wider 
field and one that must have seemed at first a 
post of limitless exactions. But his lack of 
imagination stood him in good stead. He bent 
his back to the load and did each day's work 



240 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

as it came. Unused to large responsibilities, 
unable as yet to discriminate between the du- 
ties that are executive and the duties that are 
purely clerical, and retaining all the fussiness 
of the provincial business man, he viewed all 
questions as equally important, attending per- 
sonally to all his correspondence, insisting upon 
examining for himself every item and detail of 
the executive routine, and giving hours of his 
time each day to the minutiae that the merest 
clerk could have attended to with quite as 
much efficiency. But this was, after all, a 
manifestation of the conscientiousness that 
showed itself far more commendably in higher 
matters. The rough, blunt independence of 
the man and his unimaginative turn of mind 
made him indifferent to the insidious influences 
that rise like a malarial mist about the posses- 
sor of high political office. Mere subtleties of 
suggestion were lost on this brusque Buffalo- 
nian, and anything more pointed than sugges- 
tion roused in him a sort of cross-grained spirit 
of opposition that brooked no guidance. Suave, 
astute, and wily leaders of the party, like Mr. 
Tilden, who had expected to find the inexper- 
ienced country politician a ready instrument 
in their hands, were aghast to see him forging 
along in his own way with a sort of bull-necked 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 24I 

stubbornness, clumsy and lumbering, yet with 
a power and energy which they had to recog- 
nize as very real. And the great body of the 
people, whose love for political independence 
is all the more intense because of the infre- 
quency with which they ever have a chance to 
see it, applauded this burly, obstinate, tactless, 
but intensely earnest man. They laughed when 
the professional politicians were trampled on ; 
and even the representatives of " labor," whom 
Mr. Cleveland calmly defied by his veto of a 
well-known bill, at heart respected him for his 
courage and his honesty. 

Then came Mr. Cleveland's nomination to 
the Presidency, followed by the memorable 
campaign of 1884 — that shameful contest in 
which personal scandal was belched forth by 
the writers and speakers of both parties, in 
which foul innuendo and filthy suggestion took 
the place of argument, and in which clergymen 
vied with the shouters of the stump in spread- 
ing abroad indecent charges, while even the 
graves of the dead were ransacked in search of 
fresh material for prurient pasquinades. Mr. 
Cleveland was still a bachelor, and the condot- 
ticri of the enemy thought him a fair target 
for every missile. It was the most extraor- 
dinary struggle that American political history 
16 



242 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

has ever seen — a wild debauch of slander, and 
one of u^hich every decent citizen, Republican 
or Democrat, was afterwards ashamed ; so that 
by a sort of tacit consent all subsequent cam- 
paigns have been fought out on purely public 
issues. Mr. Cleveland stood firm under the 
assaults upon his private character, though 
tempted into the writing of one very indis- 
creet and even foolish letter; and his general 
attitude was quite consistent with his reputa- 
tion for frankness and sincerity. His terse 
telegram to a friend at the beginning of the 
onslaught furnished his partisans with a new 
slogan ; so that " Tell the truth " became as 
popular a cry as " Burn this letter," though, as 
some one rather cynically remarked at the 
time, " neither was the letter burned nor was 
the truth all told." 

The hopeless break in the Republican party 
caused by the nomination of Mr. Elaine, and 
the undoubted disloyalty to him of the Conk- 
ling faction in New York, gave the Presidency 
to Mr. Cleveland by a plurality of only a few 
hundred votes in a single State. The record 
of the past twelve years must still be fresh in 
the minds of even the youngest of our readers. 
Into the details of this eventful period we can- 
not go, but they are surely among the most 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 243 

curious of auy that our history affords. How 
this untrained, unlettered, provincial lawyer, 
this local politician, this heavy-handed, tact- 
less, gruff Buffalonian drew to himself as his 
own personal following the most refined and 
highly - trained and finical men of the party 
that had always hated the very name of Demo- 
crat ; how even those, like Mr. Lowell, who 
still remained his nominal opponents, spoke 
of his sincerity and single -mindedness with 
something like the fervor of enthusiasm ; and 
how he made his own those views of govern- 
ment and economic policy that had long been 
viewed as suited only to the theorist and the 
doctrinaire ; how he imposed them upon his 
own reluctant party, and for the first time in 
many decades saved it from a purely defensive 
attitude in the arena of national politics ; how, 
though defeated for re-election, he was a third 
time nominated and then triumphantly elected 
over his formerly successful rival ; how he came 
into power again with a united party and a 
great legislative majority behind him ; how in 
a few short months he found himself without 
a loyal following ; how he was finally com- 
pelled to give at least a moral support to the 
very man who represented the idea most 
thoroughly antagonistic to that with which 



244 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

his own career is closely linked ; and how he 
at last went forth from ofifice into private life 
after having been repudiated by his own party, 
which he left disorganized and divided — these 
are but a few of the many strange anomalies 
which the record of his administration presents. 
Yet even in his less important acts an equal 
amount of contradiction is apparent. That 
the man who in 1888 denounced the baleful 
influence of capital should end by standing 
forth as the chosen champion of capital ; that 
the President whose first official utterance pro- 
claimed the unwisdom of a second term of 
office should himself become three times a can- 
didate ; that the politician who uttered words 
of comfort to the Homestead rioters should 
have stretched the Presidential prerogative al- 
most to the point of breaking in order to quell 
by military force an outbreak quite identical 
in origin ; that the strenuous advocate of an 
improved civil service should ever have put 
the machinery of appointment at the disposal 
of Mr. Eugene Higgins and Mr. Logan Car- 
lisle ; and that the statesman whose alleged 
subserviency to England was for years a gibe 
with all his enemies should have hurled against 
Great Britain the most warlike message penned 
by any American President since the time of 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 



245 



Polk — all these things in their way are just as 
remarkable and just as paradoxical as any of 
the greater incidents of his career. 

In forming an estimate of the place in his- 
tory which Mr. Cleveland and his administra- 
tion will ultimately occupy, a sharp distinction 
will have to be made between that side of him 
which is purely personal and that which be- 
longs to the sphere of statesmanship. This 
distinction is one that has in general been 
overlooked in all the recently published analy- 
ses of his public services. It is, for example, 
impossible to deny that he has made a strong 
and ineffaceable impression upon the mind of 
the American people. It is equally impossible 
to deny that he has exemplified some of the 
most admirable traits that are demanded of 
the governing man ; that he has been fearless, 
independent, honest, and sincere ; that never 
for a moment has he bent his neck to the col- 
lar of a " boss "; that very seldom has he al- 
lowed any consideration of his own personal 
interest to move him ; that he has been master 
of his ofificial household in a sense that has 
been rarely true of any American Executive ; 
that he and he alone, for good or for evil, has 
hewn out those results that must stand for all 
time as landmarks in the past twelve years of 



246 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

American history. He has shown himself to 
be, as a man, one of the most distinctly indi- 
vidual characters of the time ; and to him as 
to a President whose influence has been strong- 
ly felt, a place among the foremost must be 
given. 

It is only when one comes to view his work 
as a statesman that opinions will very serious- 
ly differ ; and until the present generation shall 
have passed away all such opinions will be ut- 
terly antipodal and quite irreconcilable. A pub- 
lic man may be all that Mr. Cleveland's warmest 
friends have claimed for him — vigorous, upright, 
forceful, and single-minded — and yet fall short 
of statesmanship. For a statesman, like a soldier 
and like an orator, must be finally and unspar- 
ingly judged solely by the measure of his suc- 
cess ; and this is especially true of one who 
fills the responsible office of the American 
Executive. The function of the President 
under our system is most intensely practical. 
Vested with immense, and in many things 
with a more than monarchical power, answer- 
able within the limits of his prerogative to no 
one, and knowing that prerogative to be not 
very accurately defined, armed with the thun- 
derbolt of the veto power, having unlimited 
patronage at his command, and secure in the 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 247 

tenure of his office for a period that cannot be 
abridged, the responsibility which rests upon 
him is correspondingly tremendous. He is at 
once the head of the State and the head of a 
party ; and both the welfare of the State and 
the welfare of the party are committed to his 
single keeping. Before his election he has 
subscribed to a definite programme of national 
policy representing the matured convictions of 
his own judgment. He has adopted a politi- 
cal creed that is accepted by him and by the 
party whose leadership he holds as embodying 
the immediate necessities of the nation. And 
therefore, when elected, he is bound by every 
obligation of honor and of conscience to em- 
body these same views and principles in the 
national legislation and administration. 

Hence, the Am ^rican President is not placed 
in office primarily to illustrate the higher ethi- 
cal virtues, but to do things ; so that his success 
or his failure depends almost entirely upon the 
manner in which these objects are accomplish- 
ed. And in the discharge of the task, the true 
statesman will adapt his methods to the attain- 
ment of his ends, having a due regard to pro- 
portion, not exalting petty measures into the 
place of vital issues, nor enshrining whims and 
glorifying ephemeral fads, but keeping the 



248 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

greater purpose steadily in view, and subordi- 
nating questions of detail and of temporary 
moment to the solemn pledges that he has 
given to the people. And in doing this he 
must work with such instruments as he has at 
hand and use to the full the powers that have 
been committed to his care. In the face of a 
great national emergency, he will not ulti- 
mately suffer in the estimation of the people 
if he even decline to look too closely at ab- 
stract theories of duty, or if he be not over nice 
in his use of the means at his disposal. This, 
to be sure, to the political purists, is something 
worse than heresy ; but it is justified by the 
whole history of modern government : for had 
Elizabeth and Burleigh and Walsingham been 
political purists, England in the sixteenth cen- 
tury would have been overwhelmed by the 
Continental coalitions ; had Cavour been a 
political purist. United Italy would have still 
remained the unsubstantial dream of a few 
poor visionaries ; had Bismarck been a politi- 
cal purist, the German Empire would have 
slumbered for another century in the cave of 
Barbarossa. It is, no doubt, a hard saying 
that in the statesman, purity of motive, in- 
tegrity of purpose, and the courage of convic- 
tion are not enough to confer enduring fame; 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 249 

yet this is emphatically true : and history shows 
that merely negative results and excellent in- 
tentions can give no rank comparable with 
that which he attains who with wisdom, calm- 
ness, and the higher strength which does not 
bluster, conquers a complete success and leaves 
a mark upon the record of supreme achieve- 
ment. 

Judged, then, by such a test as this, it is 
very hard to see how Mr. Cleveland can ever 
find a place in the foremost line of American 
statesmen. It was, indeed, unfortunate for 
him that practically his whole preparation for 
the task of governing came to him in two short 
years while holding the chief executive ofifice 
of the State of New York. For with his natu- 
rally arbitrary and self-sufHcient temperament, 
this formed the worst possible sort of prepara- 
tion for the presidency. In the first place, the 
Governor of New York, in his relation to the 
Legislature of the State, is more influential 
and more irresponsible than is the President 
of the United States in his relation to the na- 
tional Congress. And the cause of this is ob- 
vious. The New York Legislature, like all 
our State assemblies of the sort, is composed 
chiefly of men who make no claim to national 
distinction, and whose ambitions are very limit- 



250 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 



ed and local. The public does not watch them 
as individuals. They make no figure in the pop- 
ular mind. Consequently, their only thought 
is of the petty districts which they are sup- 
posed to represent, of the voters in their im- 
mediate vicinity, and of the interests of the 
section from which they come. Their activi- 
ties are limited to getting through small bits 
of special legislation or to engineering a dicker 
with the representatives of opposing interests. 
To these men the Governor is politically om- 
nipotent, for the loss of his favor means the 
hopeless blocking of their schemes. If, there- 
fore, he is disposed to be arbitrary, self-suf- 
ficient, and impatient of advice, this is seldom 
resented, and there is really no appreciable 
check upon such tendencies, provided, as is 
frequently the case, his own party control 
the Legislature ; and even if he be not already 
given to playing the dictator, the practical su- 
premacy which he here enjoys will very likely 
make him so. It was in this office that Mr. 
Cleveland acquired such knowledge of admin- 
istration on a large scale as he gained prior to 
his assumption of the presidential chair; and it 
was, we say, distinctly unfortunate that his 
experience should have been limited to this 
one sphere, in which all his natural prone- 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 25 I 

ness to arrogance was fostered and inten- 
sified. 

The downright aggressive and unconcilia- 
tory methods that he had made his own while 
Governor he carried with him to the nation- 
al capital ; and it may be assumed that they 
were in no wise modified by his consciousness' 
of the extraordinary fortune that had made 
him the first Democratic President to be actu- 
ally seated after the failures and mistakes of a 
quarter of a century. He doubtless felt that if 
disregard of personal and party ties, absolute 
reliance upon his own judgment, intolerance 
of the most friendly counsel, and an ill -sup- 
pressed contempt for the experience of his 
associates and followers could make him a 
successful Governor and lead him directly to 
the presidential chair, those same qualities 
were a good enough equipment for governing 
the nation. 

And it was here that he made a great, 
and in some respects a fatal, mistake ; for the 
conditions of government at Albany and at 
Washington are not the same ; since Congress 
is a very different body in tone and in temper 
from the Legislature of a State. It is just 
now the fashion to decry the capacity and the 
character of the men who represent their States 



252 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

in the Senate and the House, to profess to 
see in them only a collection of demagogues 
and log-rollers and "cranks"; but to bring 
against them so sweeping an indictment as this 
is in reality to attack the whole system under 
which the American people live. If a free, in- 
telligent, and keen-sighted electorate does not 
or cannot choose for itself legislators who 
truly represent it, then, after more than a cen- 
tury of trial, republican government is proved 
to be a failure and its fundamental theory a 
falsehood and a sham. But as a matter of fact, 
while there are doubtless in both Houses of 
Congress men whose characters are soiled, men 
whose aims are sordid, men whose capacity is 
limited, and men whose views of the public 
service are perverted and even base, it is pre- 
posterous to assert that the great majority of 
them arc anything but patriotic, conscientious, 
and sincere. Unlike the members of a local 
legislature, they are men who know that what 
they do is done in the public eye. They cher- 
ish a laudable ambition for future advance- 
ment. They have opinions of their own, and 
they feel the influence of other motives than 
those which actuate the obscure political eph- 
emeridae who flit across the scene at Albany, 
or Madison, or Little Rock. In their own 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 253 

States they arc men of standing and impor- 
tance, and in the Avhitc light that beats upon 
the Capitol they are not to be led by the nose 
with a hook or lashed into a supine submission 
even when it is a President of their own party 
who cracks the whip. Hence, when Mr. Cleve- 
land resumed at Washington the role that he 
had played so easily at Albany, he aroused at 
once in the minds even of his own partisans a 
very natural resentment which deepened with 
time into a feeling of the intensest personal 
dislike. His capacity for making unnecessary 
enemies is, indeed, one of the very strangest 
facts of his career ; and it has proved fatal to 
the success of the two great policies that 
through both his terms of ofifice have been 
the nearest to his heart. During his first ad- 
ministration, to be sure, while the Senate was 
still in the handb of his opponents, while the 
country had not even yet given an emphatic 
" mandate" to the Democratic Party, and while 
a return to power was still a novel and agreea- 
ble sensation, such dislike as was excited in 
that party by Mr. Cleveland's tactlessness 
found no loud public utterance. But when his 
second term began with both Houses of Con- 
gress safely Democratic, and with an immense 
popular majority behind them, the discontent 



254 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

that had been slumbering so long broke forth 
in open opposition. 

In a very able and almost convincing analy- 
sis of Mr. Cleveland's public life that has been 
lately published, and that is probably the work 
of Mr. E. L. Godkin, a practical admission of 
Mr. Cleveland's lack of tact is made ; but it is 
asserted that, in the emergencies which con- 
fronted him, tact was not the quality most req- 
uisite ; that stubborn courage was the one thing 
needful. In consequence, the case for Mr. 
Cleveland is made to rest upon the negative 
successes that he achieved in blocking meas- 
ures which he held to be unwise. " Such 
work," says Mr. Godkin, " cannot be done by 
means of tact." Yet on the same page of the 
same issue of the journal in which this argu- 
ment appears Mr. Godkin denounces the ex- 
piring Congress for the purely negative char- 
acter of its work ; and again and again has 
he dwelt upon the delight experienced by 
Senators and Representatives alike in defeat- 
ing any measure that was known to have 
President Cleveland's personal approval. Why, 
then, were these things so, and of what, when 
taken together, are they significant? 

In Mr. Cleveland's public career two great 
measures of national policy stand out as those 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 255 

which he has ahvays strongly pressed and with 
which his name is most distinctively associated. 
The first of these was a radical reform of the 
tariff upon a non-protective basis ; and the sec- 
ond was such a modification of our financial 
system as would make that system unmistak- 
ably a system of gold monometallism. The 
reform of the tariff seemed to him so vital an 
issue that for its sake he incurred defeat at 
the polls in 1888; and his party frankly ac- 
cepted his views and brought him back to 
office by a vast majority in 1892, after a cam- 
paign fought out upon this issue. His finan- 
cial policy, which was thoroughly understood 
in this campaign, was also tacitly approved by 
his followers, for they nominated him with a 
full knowledge of his views and of his future 
action. Now, if his statesmanship is to be 
judged by anything at all, it surely may be 
judged by the manner in which he led his 
party in relation to these two vitally impor- 
tant measures. And what does the record 
show ? With regard to the tariff, it shows that 
on coming into power after a successful con- 
test decided on this very issue, with all the 
prestige that attends a party leader who has 
triumphed over political traditions, with a 
party pledged in its official utterances to the 



256 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

policy of its chief, and with a great majority 
in Congress elected to carry out this pledge, 
the only result that was attained, after months 
of labor and debate, was a legislative measure 
so ludicrously unlike what had been promised, 
so inconsistent in its provisions, and so emas- 
culated in principle, that Mr. Cleveland him- 
self was ashamed to sign it, and allowed it to 
become a law without his signature. In the 
sphere of finance the story of his leadership is 
still more lamentable, for not only was no 
definite financial measure passed, but in the 
effort to accomplish something, the friction 
between the President and his party went be- 
yond the stage of quiet opposition and blazed 
out into open revolt, so that the party itself 
was split into opposing factions until the ma- 
jority, in absolute defiance of its chief, broke 
away from his leadership altogether, repudi- 
ated all his tenets, and in the Chicago Con- 
vention wrote a declaration of principles every 
line of which was like a slap full in the face 
of the President whom those same men had 
once triumphantly elected. Then we have the 
strange spectacle of Mr. Cleveland, in order to 
save his financial doctrines from the general 
wreck, throwing over all his economic theories 
and aiding, at least by indirection, the fortunes 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 257 

of Mr. McKinley, his party's foe, a man whose 
name is hnked with the most extreme of all 
the tariff legislation that Mr. Cleveland had for 
years denounced as robbery. If this be states- 
manship, then statesmanship is but a synonym 
for anarchy. 

The partisans of Mr. Cleveland have seen fit 
to throw the whole responsibility of this fiasco 
upon the Congress that thwarted and rejected 
his two policies. They say that in the face of 
such corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and 
personal malice as they think existed in both 
Houses, no President could have done what 
Mr. Cleveland tried to do. They say that this 
very opposition is only one more tribute to 
his political purity and uncompromising in- 
tegrity of character. They " love him for the 
enemies that he has made," and describe his 
failure by the honorific name of " success in 
defeat." How, they ask, could he possibly 
prevail in the face of such a Congress ? But 
this question is in reality an impeachment of 
his statesmanship. A great party leader must 
do his work with such instruments as he has 
at hand. A Congress gathered from all sec- 
tions of the country will always represent con- 
flicting interests, and it will always be filled 
with men discordant in their views and diffi- 
17 



258 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

cult of management. But every one knows 
this. This is the condition of the problem, 
the premise of party government, the accepted 
rule of the great political game. The mere 
politician will often shrink from the task, but 
the inspired statesman will master the diffi- 
culties, adapt his methods to his instruments, 
prevail by management, by tact, by judicious 
compromise, and in the end attain a lasting 
and complete success. When a party leader, 
after assuming the guidance of a great major- 
ity, and with all the power of the executive 
office at his disposal, dismembers his party, 
wrecks his own most cherished measures, and 
then cries out that he is not responsible, owing 
to the machinations of evil and malicious men, 
this is to plead the baby-act in its most pre- 
posterous form. And this is just where Mr. 
Cleveland's lack of tact assumes a critical im- 
portance. To go bellowing and snorting 
through the labyrinth of legislation like a po- 
litical Minotaur, goring recklessly at every 
prejudice, butting into every possible obstacle, 
and trampling defiantly on every personal and 
political susceptibility, is perhaps courageous, 
picturesque, exhilarating, amusing, magnif- 
icent, anything else you please — but it is not 
statesmanship. When Mr. Cleveland's friends 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 259 

disclose the list of Senators and Representa- 
tives who severed even their personal relations 
with him, and who rejoiced to hamper and de- 
feat even those measures to which they were 
themselves by no means hostile, merely be- 
cause in so defeating them they were defeat- 
ing him, is not this in reality the strongest pos- 
sible indictment of his administrative capacity? 
Is not the possession of a temperament that 
rouses incessant opposition and dislike as fatal 
a defect in a statesman as would be the pos- 
session of a club-foot in a professional athlete? 
As a matter of fact, the American President 
has infinite resources of conciliation if he but 
know how to use them : social influences, the 
prestige of his office, and, under our system, 
the enormous patronage whose use in winning 
congressional support is sanctioned by long 
custom. Mr. Cleveland himself is generally 
held to have employed this latter instrument 
in the contest which resulted in the repeal of 
the Sherman Silver Act ; and in any case, the 
thought of its employment need not have ex- 
cited any thrills of horror in a President who 
nominated Mr. James J. Van Alen to the 
Italian mission as a reward for pecuniary con- 
tributions to a campaign fund. 

It is not likely that any one to-day will claim 



26o PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

that in political courage, personal honor, and 
high appreciation of public duty, President 
Lincoln was inferior to Mr. Cleveland ; yet to 
recall the history of his administration is to 
recall that higher type of statesmanship which 
succeeds, as distinct from the spurious variety 
which fails. The problem of government as 
it confronted Mr, Lincoln was far more difili- 
cult than that which Mr. Cleveland had lo 
meet. Elected by only a minority of the 
popular vote, unknown to many of his own 
party, with no executive experience whatever, 
mocked at by those who possessed the super- 
ficial polish which he lacked, taking office with 
a bankrupt treasury, a country divided and 
darkened by approaching war, with incompe- 
tence and inexperience everywhere conspicu- 
ous, he stood alone upon the threshold of an 
agonizing crisis, with scarcely one adviser on 
whose wisdom and devoted loyalty he could 
perfectly rely. Congress was full of faction : 
there were those fierce fanatics, the Macbriars 
and Mucklewraths of Abolitionism, panting for 
all that was extreme and violent, and looking 
upon the President as a Gallio whenever he 
held back from following their frantic lead. 
There were the War Democrats, patriotic and 
sincere, but timid, superstitiously shrinking 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 261 

from anything that savored of extra-constitu- 
tional procedure, and reluctant to assent to it 
even in the exigencies of a struggle for na- 
tional existence. There was also a small but 
venomous minority made up of those whose 
sympathies were really with the South, and 
who watched every move of the administra- 
tion with sleepless vigilance, ready at an in- 
stant's notice to pounce upon its errors and 
discredit all its counsels. In the Cabinet it- 
self the situation was, if anything, still more 
disheartening. The wily, adroit, and immense- 
ly able Seward, past - master of political in- 
trigue, could not be expected all at once to 
show unqualified devotion to a President who 
had defeated him for the nomination that had 
been the great ambition of his life. Chase, as 
the letters published after his death most plain- 
ly show, was thoroughly disloyal, at first de- 
spising his chief, and always intriguing against 
him. A little later, and Stanton, a life -long 
Democrat, a man of violent and arbitrary will, 
prone to insubordination and arrogance, intro- 
duced into the President's official household 
another element of discord. Moreover, thou- 
sands of honest but unwisely impatient citi- 
zens were fretting at inevitable delay, heart- 
sick at the tidings of disaster that came thick 



262 PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

and fast with every bulletin, and ready to be 
convinced that the Head of the State was in- 
competent or frivolous or shallow. Add to 
this the fact that the passions of all men were 
inflamed to the highest pitch, that reason was 
stifled, that greed and jobbery and corruption, 
starting up in a night at the first breath of 
war, throve rankly in every department of the 
government, and set their swarms of shame- 
less satellites upon the President to beg and 
bluster and bedevil. From such a carnival of 
faction and folly the ablest and the purest 
might well have shrunk appalled ; the wisest 
might have taken up the task and failed with- 
out discredit. But Lincoln, with that clear 
vision and that serenity of temper that never 
failed him, did not for one moment falter or 
complain. He mastered his Cabinet from the 
first, and insured at least its loyalty to the 
public service, if not to him ; he compacted 
into an efficient legislative entity the inhar- 
monious factions of the Congress, yielding a 
little here and giving a little there, conciliating 
opposition, gently disarming prejudice, always 
patient and kindly, but never for a moment 
losing sight of the one great end in view, until 
at last the fight was won and he stood forth 
the absolute master of his party, supreme, un- 



PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 263 

challenged, and successful in that victory which 
was not his victory alone, but first of all his 
country's. And this was statesmanship. 

Yet, if a study of Mr. Cleveland's two ad- 
ministrations should fail to prove his claim to 
the highest title given to the ruler of a great 
people, it still yields much that an American 
may view with quiet satisfaction. That one 
with little preparation for the task, one who 
was no student of public affairs, but who was 
taken almost at random from the mass of or- 
dinary citizens, could still in two great ad- 
ministrative offices display no weakness, but 
maintain his personal independence ; that he 
could hold his own and make a lasting im- 
pression upon the imaginations of his coun- 
trymen by his tenacity, his integrity, and his 
unflinching courage — this fact is one that is dis- 
tinctly reassuring. Whatever mistakes he may 
have made, however far he may have fallen 
short of the highest ideals of statesmanship, 
his career still shows that the Anglo-Saxon 
capacity for government everywhere exists in 
our transplanted race ; and so long as this is 
true, no thoughtful American need ever for 
one moment despair of the life or of the honor 
of the Great Republic. 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

The recent Presidential nomination by one 
of the great political parties of a comparatively 
unknown man because of the impression pro- 
duced upon the nominating convention by a 
bit of fervid oratory has, naturally enough, led 
to an immense amount of discussion as to the 
present condition and the future possibilities 
of political eloquence. For quite a number of 
years it has been taken for granted that the age 
of oratory has gone by forever; that the time 
when a brilliant speaker could dominate the 
minds of a great assemblage will never return ; 
and that the remarkable masters of eloquence 
whose forensic efforts are as familiar as their 
names have left behind them no successors 
whatsoever. Even Professor Sears, in his ad- 
mirable history of oratory, which is the latest 
contribution to the serious literature of the 
subject, speaks of the race of orators as to- 
day extinct. 

The only difference of opinion that has been 



268 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

manifested has shown itself in an attempt to 
explain just why great speeches are no longer 
made. One theory attributes it to a general 
decline of intellectual ability in our public 
men, to the tendencies that force into other 
fields than that of statesmanship the keenest 
and most brilliant minds of the rising genera- 
tion, and to a universal drift towards the com- 
monplace and conventional that is depriving 
modern life, both public and private, of its 
color and its old - time picturesqueness. The 
other hypothesis finds the cause in an assumed 
change that has come over the whole body of 
our people. We are told that men are more 
highly trained to-day than in the past; that 
they are intellectually more self-restrained and 
less impulsive ; that they read more and think 
more for themselves ; and that they are al- 
most universally touched with a certain cyni- 
cism and sceptical indifference that render 
them far less susceptible than formerly to any 
appeal to their emotions. Hence, it is said, 
such oratory as survives is in reality little more 
than business talk, mere logical exposition in 
which there is no place for the passion and 
the fire that flamed in the words of a Patrick 
Henry or a Webster ; so that, in our great na- 
tional forum, Senators and Representatives 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 269 

alike stand up and read their speeches, or are 
contented even with the customary " leave to 
print." 

One cannot but think that both these ex- 
planations are altogether wrong. They utterly 
ignore the simpler and more natural solution 
to be found in the remarkable change that has 
taken place in the nature of the questions that 
have now for the past two decades been most 
prominent in the sphere of American politics. 
For the first time in our national history the 
popular thought is centred wholly upon issues 
that are absolutely economic and in no sense 
sentimental. 

In the later colonial period, at which time 
the history of American oratory in reality be- 
gins, although the question that divided the 
colonies from the mother-country was osten- 
sibly a question of taxation, the underlying 
principle was more profoundly fundamental 
and more vital than one of constitutional re- 
lations. The thirteen colonies were just be- 
ginning to thrill with the half-unconscious stir- 
rings of national life. Men dimly saw within 
their grasp the symbols and the splendor of 
sovereignty ; they felt the strong creative im- 
pulse that is always present in the heart of the 
Anglo-Saxon; they were rousing themselves 



270 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

to a recognition of the magnificence of their 
future, to the fact that they were no longer 
mere colonials, provincials, subjects of a foreign 
king, but free men in a free State, with a her- 
itage of unlimited promise and with the power 
to claim it and defend it, if necessary, by force 
of arms. Therefore, when Patrick Henry and 
when Samuel Adams spoke, their words ap- 
pealed to no sordid sentiment in those who 
heard them ; but they voiced the aspirations 
of an entire people moved to its very heart by 
a prophetic consciousness of its own high des- 
tiny. 

Again, after independence had been achieved 
and had finally ceased to be a theme for any- 
thing more than occasional oratory, there arose 
another issue that involved the strongest pos- 
sible appeal to sentiment. The question of 
slavery in some of its innumerable phases often 
appeared to be nothing but a problem of po- 
litical economy or of constitutional interpreta- 
tion. For years the leading statesmen of both 
parties strove to make it such, to throw it into 
the background by compromise and concession, 
and to lock the door upon the national skel- 
eton. But because it was at base a question 
of sentiment, appealing to men's sense of jus- 
tice and mercy and righteousness, it would not 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 271 

down ; and when it had at last become indis- 
solubly linked with still another and even 
greater cause — the maintenance of our national 
unity and the very life of the Republic — it 
stirred the profoundest depths of the nation's 
heart. No more momentous issue was ever 
yet evoked in the history of man, for it in- 
volved far more than the existence of a single 
nation ; it concerned the success or failure of 
republican government and the fate of free in- 
stitutions. No wonder, then, that it inspired 
oratory to which the annals of recorded elo- 
quence can find no parallel. The day when 
Webster rose in the Senate of the United 
States to deliver, amid a silence like that of 
death, his marvellous reply to Hayne, may well 
be thought the most memorable and moment- 
ous in the whole history of the American Re- 
public. And the speech of Webster was in 
every word and every line fully up to the sub- 
lime level of the issues it discussed. It is no 
exaggeration to say that it overtops any other 
effort of human eloquence that the world has 
known. ■^" Its only rival is the oration of De- 
mosthenes on the Crown ; and this, I think, 

* Lest this be thought extravagant, it may be interesting 
to note that the Lord Chief Justice of England, Baron Russell 
of Killowen, himself a finished orator, declared to an Ameri- 



272 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

holding strictly to the attitude of dispassionate 
criticism, must take the second place. In pa- 
triotic fervor, in sincerity, in absolute mastery 
of the resources of rhetoric, and in intellectual 
power, the two great orators were equal ; but 
from the stand-point of historical importance, 
and, above all, in the vastness of the ultimate 
consequences, the Greek must yield to the 
American. For in the case of Demosthenes 
the issue was immediately personal ; in the 
case of Webster the issue was distinctly na- 
tional. Demosthenes was defending and ex- 
tenuating a political failure ; Webster was 
pointing the way to a national triumph. The 
greatness upon which Demosthenes so fondly 
dwelt was retrospective ; the greatness that 
Webster limned before his breathless hearers 
lay in the living present and the future. One 
statesman appealed to a proud and melancholy 
memory ; the other to a splendid aspiration. 
One was pronouncing a stately funeral oration ; 
the other was sounding a great trumpet-call 
to victory. And in the actual results achieved 
there can be no comparison. Athenian liberty 
was already dead, and no words, however elo- 

can friend some little time ago that in his opinion Webster 
was, on the whole, the greatest master of eloquence of whom 
the world has any record. 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 273 

quent, could bring it back to life. But Amer- 
ican nationality was just feeling its first vigor- 
ous, vital impulse. The words of Demosthenes 
could, at the best, awaken in the mind of an 
Athenian nothing more than a sombre stirring 
of humiliation and regret for a past forever 
gone ; the Avords of Webster, committed to 
memory and declaimed by generations of 
American children, sank down into the hearts 
of his countrymen until his closing sentence 
became the very watchword of the Republic, 
and until the great principle for which bespoke 
had been learned so thoroughly that when the 
years of storm and stress arrived a million men 
stood ready to pour out their blood like water, 
and a million mothers sent forth their sons with 
gladness to die in its defence. And the oration 
itself — what a wonderful thing it is ! Its dig- 
nified and graceful exordium, its stately senten- 
ces moving on with an ever-growing impetus 
and throbbing with a joyous consciousness of 
irresistible power, its passion and pathos, its 
majestic rhythm and cadenced harmonies ris- 
ing and sinking like a grand organ-roll or the 
thunder of the sea, and finally the magnificent 
sunburst of gorgeous imagery with which it 
ends ! Even now, after more than sixty years 
have passed, and after the issues that inspired 



274 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

it have been laid at rest forever, no American 
who deserves the name can read over those tre- 
mendous sentences without feehng his pulses 
quicken and his heart thrill with an exultant 
emotion so keen as to be almost pain. 

As for Cicero, it would be absurd to com- 
pare him as an orator with either of the others. 
The fatal insincerity of character that taints 
his utterances makes some of his most elabo- 
rate orations, in spite of their rhetorical per- 
fection, seem cheap and thin when set beside 
the massive eloquence of Demosthenes and 
Webster ; his impassioned declamation too 
often suggests the actor's rant ; his invective 
and his pathos at times come perilously near 
to the neurotic caterwauling of an hysterical 
woman. 

Oratory naturally found a powerful stimulus 
in the Civil War and in the questions immedi- 
ately arising from it ; and for many years 
thereafter it was always possible for the polit- 
ical speaker to stir his hearers by calling up 
once more the memories and the passions of 
that gigantic conflict. But as a new genera- 
tion came upon the scene and as other issues 
gradually forced their way to the front, elo- 
quence was tamed. When the phrase, " waving 
the bloody shirt," was once coined, it marked 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 275 

the end of the oratory that fed upon martial 
themes. Since 1880 the minds of the people 
have been fixed with more and more persist- 
ence upon the economic and financial policy 
of the country ; and in this sphere there is 
little food for forensic eloquence. The sched- 
ules of a tariff are not inspiring to a popular 
orator; barbed wire and jute and cotton ties, 
and the relative merits of ad valorem and 
specific duties, cannot possibly be worked up 
into rhetorical material even by the most in- 
genious pleader. Nor is the financial question 
much more promising. There are persons, in- 
deed, who have dwelt with harrowing detail 
upon the wrongs and sufferings of silver, and 
who have depicted in tones of horror the cow- 
ardice and the malevolence of gold ; but the 
oratorical effect has not been striking. It is 
very difficult to draw tears from a hard-headed 
American crowd over the injuries and sorrows 
of a metal ; nor will many persons rage to- 
gether because of the depravity of something 
that can be represented by a chemical symbol. 
It is only when a more direct and personal 
turn can be given to the theme that an orator 
has any chance of real success. This is pretty 
well illustrated in Mr. Bryan's now memora- 
ble speech at Chicago in July, 1896. Had he 



276 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

dwelt, as did the opposing speakers, upon the 
purely economic side of the question, he would 
have left the convention as cold as they did. 
He therefore deliberately chose to make the 
issue a sectional one : to pit the West against 
the East ; to describe in impassioned language 
the honest farmer in his peaceful home ground 
down by malevolent oppressors, at whom the 
orator flung a fierce defiance. In other words, 
he turned a question of finance into a question 
of pure sentiment. As to the justice or the 
wisdom or the patriotism of this device, we 
are not here concerned ; but from the orator- 
ical point of view it was very shrewd, and it 
showed that Mr. Bryan possessed the orator- 
ical instinct in a very high degree. Its success 
was, indeed, its justification ; for as the sole 
aim of the orator is to master his audience 
and play upon their feelings until he can bend 
them to his will, oratory is the one thing of 
which the only criterion is success. The same 
remark applies to the substance of this speech, 
which has been criticised as tawdry, stilted, 
and even blasphemous ; but which (ethical 
considerations apart) was, in fact, rhetorically 
perfect as being exactly suited to the state of 
mind of those who heard it and were mastered 
by it. 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 277 

It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that 
the present lack of oratory of a startling and 
dramatic kind is due neither to any decline 
in oratorical ability on the part of our public 
speakers, nor to any loss of impressibility on 
the part of the American people — certainly 
not to the latter, for there is ample evidence 
that as a nation we are becoming more rather 
than less emotional, more nervous, more ex- 
citable. But when the themes of oratory are 
not those that feed popular passion, the born 
orator pitches his utterances in a low key and 
subdues his whole discourse to the natural 
level of his subject. In fact, it is in this very 
thing that his real genius is best seen ; for pre- 
cisely in proportion to his greatness will an 
unerring instinct teach him to shun any at- 
tempt to elevate by purely rhetorical devices 
a theme that is in itself essentially common- 
place. Hence it is that the ablest of our 
speakers to-day are just the ones who never 
force the note, but wisely prefer to leave upon 
their hearers the impression embodied in the 
fine Horatian description 

urbani parcentis viribus atque 
Extenuantis eas consulto ; 

and those who neglect this precept often come 



278 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

perilously near the line where declamation 
passes into rant. 

It is in this respect that the public speakers 
of the South are so curiously defective. As 
a class, they seem to think that any subject 
whatsoever can be made impressive provided 
it be plastered thick with a multiplicity of 
gaudy adjectives, bedizened with innumera- 
ble metaphors, and daubed all over with the 
raddle of rhetorical rouge. These men sow 
with the sack and not with the hand, and be- 
lieve that they have hit upon an infallible 
formula for producing "eloquence" to order. 
I have in mind the Chief Executive of one 
of the oldest and stateliest of the Southern 
States, whose speeches are the rednctio ad ab- 
S7irdiim of this barbaric style. Whether he is 
delivering an inaugural address, or whether he 
is speaking over the pumpkins at a county fair, 
his verbal pyrotechnics are such that if I were 
to set down one of his passages in cold type 
most readers would suspect that I had invent- 
ed it in a spirit of the wildest and most farci- 
cal burlesque. I do not know just how such 
oratory is generally regarded in the South. 
If it is taken seriously and viewed with ad- 
miration, the fact is a lamentable indication 
of the condition of public taste and of the 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 279 

lack of any wide-spread aesthetic cultivation ; 
for were such a speaker to dress in a man- 
ner to harmonize with his oratorical style, 
he would appear before his audiences array- 
ed in a nose -ring and an inch of vermilion 
paint. 

It must be confessed, however, that the 
South has no monopoly of this half -savage 
sort of pow-wow. All the national conven- 
tions held in 1896 provided choice specimens 
of it in nominating speeches that fairly knock- 
ed the bottom out of the vocabulary of eulogy, 
when some backwoods lawyer, unknown even 
to many of the delegates from his own State, 
would be described as " the peerless jurist, the 
profound scholar, the magnificent and electri- 
fying orator, the world's greatest statesman 
and thinker !" At such utterances as these, 
pronounced before deliberative bodies that are 
supposed to shape the nation's poHcy and se- 
lect its rulers, the self-respecting American can 
only blush for the credit of the Republic. 

It is, indeed, in the subtle instinct that tells 
just how the discourse is to be attuned to the 
mood of the moment that the true orator is 
ultimately to be distinguished from the mere 
rhetorician. Nice judgment, perfect tact, and 
an innate sense of what is possible to be ac- 



28o SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

complished in a given situation have often 
done far more for a reputation than the actual 
arts of eloquence. A contemporaneous illus- 
tration may be found in Mr. Bryan's address 
at the Madison Square Garden, in this city, in 
reply to the Committee of Notification, which 
is an excellent case in point. His passionate 
harangue at Chicago and its remarkable effect 
on his immediate hearers had led every one to 
expect an equally fiery oration in New York; 
yet when he appeared before the great assem- 
bly that had gathered to receive him, he sim- 
ply read a written essay with no attempt at 
eloquence whatever. His political opponents 
at once raised a howl of derision, and even 
many of his own supporters were for the mo- 
ment much chagrined. Yet this was in re- 
ality one of the cleverest things that he had 
ever done ; and the reason for this opinion is 
perfectly obvious. In the interval between 
his Chicago speech and the time set for his 
New York address, public expectation had 
been worked up to so extravagant a pitch that 
had he been Demosthenes and Cicero rolled 
into one he could not possibly have satisfied 
it. He therefore very wisely declined to at- 
tempt what, from the conditions, was fore- 
doomed to failure — declined, in fact, to com- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 28 1 

pete against himself. To be sure, by reading 
an essay instead of delivering an oration, he 
disappointed his auditors, and he was gibed 
by the opposition press ; but he did not for- 
feit his reputation as an orator, and this seem- 
ing fiasco made an admirable background for 
any brilliant and effective speeches that he 
might subsequently deliver. 

Political orations in general may be classi- 
fied under three heads. First come those 
great efforts that are overwhelming in their 
effect at the time of their delivery, and that 
stand the test of time so well as even now to 
be read with genuine pleasure and admiration. 
Next come the speeches that produce no great 
effect upon their immediate hearers, but that 
subsequently, by reason of their literary merit, 
take high rank among the classics of the lan- 
guage in which they are composed. Finally, 
there are the orations that serve their purpose 
at the time, or that win a temporary renown 
by reason of the occasion on which they were 
delivered, or because of the personal charm 
and impressiveness of the orator, but which are 
afterwards of little interest except as affording 
material for the historian. To the first class 
belong the greatest speeches of Demosthenes, 
of Webster, of Cicero, and perhaps of Lincoln. 



282 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

Of the second class a type may be found in 
the parhamentary orations of Burke, who al- 
ways emptied the House of Commons when 
he spoke, but whose loftiness of thought and 
splendor of diction have won for him a lasting 
place in the annals of political eloquence. To 
the third class belong the great mass of politi- 
cal orations in all ages and all countries. Such 
are the speeches of Henry Clay, in reading 
which one marvels at the effect which we know 
to have been produced by them, of Hayne 
and Benton and Everett and Legare, of J. P. 
Hale and Sumner and Stevens, and, in fact, of 
pretty nearly all the American orators of the 
past fifty years. 

In this country the public estimate of living 
orators is seldom accurate, because it is so 
warped and biassed by partisan prejudice. It 
is, moreover, largely influenced by the news- 
papers, which usually carry their criticism of 
the substance into condemnation of the form. 
Seldom, indeed, does a Democratic journal see 
anything to admire in the oratory of a Repub- 
lican statesman ; and in estimating the merit 
of a Democratic speaker, the Republican crit- 
ics almost invariably (to use the time-honored 
expression) "dismiss it with a smile." Conse- 
quently, it is not until death has blunted the 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 2S3 

sharpness of political acrimony that anything 
like a truthful estimate is ever formed, and 
even then it may be many years before the 
exaggerations of both partisan panegyric and 
partisan depreciation have fully passed away. 

It is probable, for instance, that among all 
the orators of the past two decades public 
opinion at the present time would ascribe a 
marked supremacy to Mr, Blaine. Yet it is 
certain that it was not primarily as an orator 
that Mr. Blaine secured and kept his remark- 
able influence over the host of those who fol- 
lowed so loyally his personal and political 
fortunes. Mr. Blaine had, to be sure, the ora- 
tor's temperament. He was mentally alert, 
quick to seize upon an effective point, impet- 
uous, and in his early career full of fire. He 
had an unusual command of the resources of 
language, and unfailing tact and taste. Yet 
the fact remains that it was not through ora- 
tory that he won the commanding position 
which he held in his party's counsels, nor did 
he rely upon it to any great extent in carry- 
ing out his political ambitions. The reason is 
not far to seek. It is found in the fact that 
very early in his career he set before himself 
the presidency as the goal of his ambition, 
and with this always in mind he purposely 



284 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

modified and restrained his natural bent in 
many ways. Now Mr. Blaine was by nature 
an exceedingly impulsive man, one whose tem- 
perament led him to form decisions with light- 
ninglike rapidity, and to act upon them with 
unchecked and unreflecting impetuosity. In 
this quality of mind lay at once his strength 
and his weakness, and to it his greatest suc- 
cesses and his greatest mistakes are alike di- 
rectly traceable. Had he been content to 
limit his ambition to anything short of the 
highest office in the nation's gift, he would un- 
doubtedly have let his oratorical talent have 
full play, and would have deserved the repu- 
tation for eloquence that is now, I think, 
unreasonably given him. It was, to be sure, 
by a spirited and brilliant speech that he won 
his first great national distinction, while still 
a member of the House of Representatives. 
The occasion was a debate upon the question 
of granting a complete political amnesty to 
Jefferson Davis, in spite of the fact that Mr. 
Davis himself had never asked for it. Mr. 
Blaine opposed the measure, and Mr. Hill, of 
Georgia, one of the very ablest of the Southern 
leaders, stood forth as its champion and de- 
fender. In the spirited debate that followed, 
Mr. Blaine gave full play to his impetuosity. 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 285 

With no preparation and no premeditation, he 
flung himself into the forensic combat, and in 
a burst of vivid oratory fanned again the fires 
of sectional feeling which had begun to smoul- 
der, but which at his words once more flamed 
up as fiercely as in the days of the Civil War. 
The whole North thrilled at his passionate ap- 
peal, and in an hour his name was in all men's 
mouths. It was the victory of a partisan, but 
it was magnificent nevertheless ; and the mem- 
ory of it led Colonel Ingersoll a few years 
later, in an almost equally celebrated speech, 
to style him "the Plumed Knight," a title that 
presently became hackneyed in the vocabulary 
of the stump. Yet never again did Mr. Blaine 
fully give way to an oratorical impulse such 
as this. Experience and keen self-analysis 
taught him the danger that lay in his own im- 
petuosity, and from the moment when he first 
formed a definite ambition to be President he 
set a bridle on his tongue. His speeches there- 
after were able, ingenious, and adequate, but, 
to the present writer at least, there seemed al- 
ways to run through them a certain tone of 
calculation, of conscious design half verging 
upon craft, that robbed them of their sponta- 
neity and greatly marred their psychological 
effect. The speaker seemed always to be keep- 



286 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

ing something back, to withhold a part of his 
confidence, to be playing witli his audience as 
a cat plays with a mouse, and to be very far 
indeed from the perfect self-abandonment that 
marks the inspired orator. 

Mr. Blaine's great influence as a party leader 
sprang, in fact, from a deeper source than ver- 
bal eloquence. Men early began to speak of 
his " magnetism," and the word speedily en- 
tered into the slang of our politics. It was, in 
consequence, so harped upon and burlesqued as 
to become a mere vulgarism of party speech ; 
yet, for want of a better word, it must still be 
used to express the secret of his power. Its 
real meaning, however, is not so often under- 
stood. The popular conception of a " mag- 
netic " leader is of one who wins adherents by 
a jovial bearing, by a sort of hail-fellow-well- 
met jollity, of which few statesmen were ever 
more guiltless than Mr. Blaine — a model of 
personal dignity in all his relations with his 
friends and followers. By his " magnetism " 
we should rather understand a certain power 
that he exercised, through those immediately 
in contact with him, upon great masses of men 
who had never seen him, so that they, too, 
became irresistibly convinced of his incompa- 
rable fitness for command. The manifestation 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 287 

of this power is a curious psychological study, 
and may be illustrated in a statement made to 
the present writer by an official of the State 
Department at the time when Mr. Blaine was 
Secretary. This gentleman, who was, by the 
way, politically opposed to Mr. Blaine, said 
that every morning the various officials of the 
department would be at work upon their usual 
tasks, going through them in the leisurely way 
that is traditional in this particular division of 
the public service, chatting amicably together, 
yawning, pausing to scan the morning paper, 
and in general accomplishing a minimum of 
work in a maximum of time. Suddenly, for 
no reason that any one could explain, a sort 
of impulse comparable to an electric shock 
would run through the assemblage. Conver- 
sation would cease, newspapers would be laid 
aside, pens would fly over the paper, the whole 
work of the department would all at once pro- 
ceed with intense celerity. No one had been 
heard to enter the next room, not a word of 
warning had been spoken, yet every one in 
the place knew by an inexplicable instinct that 
Mr. Blaine was in his office. 

This strange power is probably a natural at- 
tribute of the born leader of men. It was pos- 
sessed in a large degree by General Grant, a 



28S SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

man who, in temperament, training, and mental 
processes, was the very antithesis of Mr. Blaine. 
Old army officers often tell of their experi- 
ences in 1863, when the newly promoted sol- 
dier was put in command of the troops who 
were ultimately to operate against Vicksburg. 
Previous attempts against the Confederate 
stronghold had failed disastrously, and sol- 
diers and officers alike were thoroughly dis- 
heartened. There was a general inefficiency 
in the staff, and a general lack of system, 
order, and discipline throughout the army. 
Plans were made and unmade ; regiments were 
marched aimlessly backwards and forwards; 
supplies went to the wrong place ; everything, 
in fact, was at sixes and sevens. This was the 
state of things when it was announced that 
General Grant had been put in command. Old 
officers shrugged their shoulders. Here was 
more experimenting. A new general meant 
to them only a new element of confusion. On 
a certain day Grant assumed command, but not 
immediately at general headquarters. No one 
had yet seen him when, before forty-eight hours 
had elapsed, in some indefinable way a curious 
change came over the whole army. An invisi- 
ble power made itself felt in every department. 
Definite purpose began to appear in every 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 289 

move. Supplies appeared when they were 
wanted. The troops were swung into intel- 
ligible combinations. Everywhere precision, 
order, discipline reigned where before there 
had been only confusion, chaos, insubordina- 
tion. And when things were seen to be actu- 
ally done, the most inveterate grumbler on the 
staff stood up in the midst of his fellow-ofificers 
and, slapping his leg, roared out with a sort of 
Homeric joy, " At last ! at last ! By heavens, 
at last they have given us a man!" 

Therefore, it is by no means correct to lay 
too much stress on Mr. Blaine's oratory as the 
chief factor in his political supremacy. It was 
rather his resourcefulness, his tact, his con- 
structive power, his " magnetism," that se- 
cured to him his unquestioned leadership. 
Not but what his speeches were admirable 
efforts, from the purely political addresses 
that he made in the campaign of 1876 and 
1880 to the elaborate and dignified oration 
pronounced by him before the President, the 
Houses of Congress, and the Diplomatic Corps 
on the death of President Garfield. The brief 
addresses, too, that he made in his own can- 
vass for the Presidency in 1884 were admira- 
ble in their point and tact and persuasiveness ; 
though it was this campaign that extinguish- 
19 



290 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

ed his oratory altogether. The extraordinary 
labor that he took upon himself, the excite- 
ment and fatigue, and more than all else per- 
haps, his exasperating defeat by a few hundred 
votes in a single State, quenched the fire of his 
ambition, and left him a disappointed and al- 
most broken man. He spoke again in the 
campaign of 1888, but while his intellect was 
as active as before, his physical strength had 
been sapped, so that his every sentence seem- 
ed to involve an obvious and painful effort. 
The orator, like the actor, needs, above all 
else, to overflow with an abundant and vigor- 
ous vitality, because, like the actor, the im- 
pression that he makes is in no small degree a 
physical impression. Yet it was not merely in 
bodily force that Mr. Blaine's great defeat im- 
paired his power. There was a marked de- 
terioration in manner and in temper percepti- 
ble during his last few years that can, perhaps, 
be most clearly seen in some of his state papers, 
and notably in his diplomatic controversy with 
Lord Salisbury concerning the American claim 
to jurisdiction in Behring Sea. The traditions 
of diplomacy require the tone of all formal 
communications to be ceremonious and court- 
ly to the last degree. The question at issue 
may be of the most burning kind, the contro- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 29 1 

versy may be even of the sort that inevitably 
ends in war, yet nevertheless the diplomatic 
duellists must everywhere observe the most 
punctilious etiquette, and never in word or 
phrase overstep the limits of a stately self- 
restraint. These traditions Lord Salisbury, 
on his side, observed to the full. His im- 
mensely able argument was couched through- 
out in terms of the finest courtesy, suggesting 
in every line the urbanity and the graceful 
deference that mark the intercourse of high- 
bred gentlemen. But Mr. Blaine's despatches, 
whatever be their plausibility and force, are 
very painful reading. There is observable in 
them here and there a certain swagger, a half- 
rowdy tone of lurking insolence, an offensive 
assumption that his opponent's argument is 
one of conscious duplicity and falsehood. It 
is not likely that our diplomatic records con- 
tain another correspondence such as this. 
Some may advance against this view and in 
defence of Mr. Blaine the once famous Hiilse- 
mann Letter, written to the Austrian Minister 
by Daniel Webster when Secretary of State, 
and resenting the attempted protest of Austria 
against our Government's very obvious sym- 
pathies with the Hungarian insurgents. But 
this letter, in which many persons, in total dis- 



292 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

regard of chronology, have seen the original 
suggestion of the " Pogram Defiance " in Mar- 
tin Chuzzlewit, while it was, to be sure, rather 
startlingly unconventional, and, on the whole, 
rather bumptious in its manner, contained not 
a word that could give the slightest personal 
offence to its recipient. 

There is something of the irony of fate in 
the circumstance that, after years of studied 
discretion in word and act, the careless speech 
of a stranger should have been so largely in- 
strumental in marring the one great ambition 
of Mr. Blaine's career. There is something 
almost tragic, too, in the thought of all that 
long- continued effort, all that eager hope, all 
that fertility of resource, and all those brilliant 
gifts just failing of supreme success. The pres- 
ent writer saw Mr. Blaine four days before the 
election that was to set the seal of failure on 
his remarkable career. It was at the very end 
of the campaign, and he was on his way to 
some small city in Connecticut to make one 
last address. He sat by the open window of 
the railway -carriage waiting for the train to 
start. His head was bent forward, and the 
sunken eyes, the face blanched to an ashen 
pallor, and the pinched and jaded features all 
told the tale of mental weariness and physical 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 293 

exhaustion. A knot of a dozen or twenty 
men, who had gathered on the platform, stared 
curiously at him ; and now and then, as one or 
another of them approached and offered to 
shake hands, Mr. Blaine would thrust three 
fingers through the window and force a wan, 
mechanical smile. It reminded one of nothing 
half so much as of some hunted animal driven 
to its hole and turning feebly to eye its unfeel- 
ing persecutors. Could the very bitterest of 
his enemies have beheld him then, and could 
they have foreseen the impending wreck of his 
life's one great ambition, they must have felt 
some stirrings of pity, and, it may be, even of 
remorse ; for the sight was infinitely pathetic, 
and one to haunt the memory for many days. 
The extent to which false estimates of liv- 
ing orators gain popular acceptance through 
newspaper influence can be very well illustrat- 
ed in the case of Mr, Roscoe Conkling. Mr. 
Conkling was a fair speaker, no better and no 
worse than scores of others who in his day 
and generation were heard upon the floor of 
Congress. His best efforts were those of the 
earlier part of his senatorial career, during the 
Reconstruction Period ; but if any one will take 
the trouble to consult the files of the Congres- 
sional Record, he will find that, while Mr. Conk- 



294 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

ling often spoke with a good deal of ability, 
and sometimes with considerable force and 
point, there is nothing in his speeches to mark 
him out as oratorically pre-eminent among the 
other political leaders of that day, and that 
not a few of his contemporaries easily surpass- 
ed him. He was, for instance, markedly infe- 
rior to the late Matthew H. Carpenter, of Wis- 
consin, a very brilliant and effective debater, 
though by the present generation wellnigh 
forgotten. Nevertheless, from the beginning 
of President Grant's first administration, in 
1869, down to the time of his own death, in 
1888, Mr. Conkling was singled out by the 
newspaper press for the most extravagant 
laudation as being one of the most impressive, 
stirring, and convincing orators of the day. 
Even now it is a sort of tradition in newspaper 
ofifices, and therefore in the minds of a large 
number of intelligent Americans, that Mr. 
Conkling's name is always to be mentioned in 
enumerating our great masters of political 
eloquence. Mr. Conkling's oratorical reputa- 
tion, in fact, is mainly the artificial creation of 
a prolonged and elaborate newspaper " boom." 
Now, the original inventors of this myth 
were undoubtedly sincere believers in it ; and 
those who afterwards accepted it did so large- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 295 

ly as a matter of faith in an established tradi- 
tion. The explanation of the thing is a two- 
fold explanation. The first reason is found in 
Mr. Conkling's personality ; the second in the 
influence that he was able to exert through 
certain fortunate political connections. Mr, 
Conkling, as every one knows, was a man of 
rather striking presence, powerful in build, and 
one who always sought to make the most of 
his own physical advantages. He was, indeed, 
excessively vain, dressing in a way to attract 
attention, continually posing for the admira- 
tion of the galleries, and doing everything with 
an air that was meant to be impressive and 
that did impress a good many inexperienced 
persons who were unable accurately to distin- 
guish between swaggering arrogance and the 
dignity that is the accompaniment of real 
power. Whenever he made a formal speech, 
the way for it was prepared as carefully as 
when a dramatist works up a situation to 
afford an effective entrance for the leading 
actor. Mr. Conkling's strut, his portentous 
frown, his dramatic gestures, and even the ar- 
rangement of his famous curl were all studied 
out by him as minutely as his Roman proto- 
type, Hortensius, is said to have studied out 
the arrangement of the folds in his forensic 



296 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

toga. Mr. Blaine, in fact, in the very celebrated 
speech that made Conkling his implacable 
enemy for life, found in this display of person- 
al vanity the feather that winged his sharpest 
shaft. This speech, whose studied antitheses 
prove it to have been no impromptu sally, but 
a carefully prepared attack, must be regarded 
as wholly unparliamentary, and, in view of the 
place in which it was delivered, as lacking in 
the very first elements of good taste ; while 
throughout its whole comparison of Mr. Conk- 
ling with Henry Winter Davis it extravagant- 
ly overrated Davis and was in reality too 
severe upon Conkling, yet there was so large 
an element of truth in its characterization as 
to make it rankle in the latter's memory down 
to the very day of his death. The comparison 
of Mr. Conkling to a turkey-cock was at once 
caught up by all the political cartoonists, and 
thereafter the strut and the pompous pose ap- 
peared and reappeared in a pictorial form as 
ludicrous as it was felicitous. Mr. Conkling's 
theatric self-assertion, however, though repel- 
lent to most persons of refined taste, did never- 
theless impose upon a great many people, in- 
asmuch as the world at large generally takes a 
man at his own valuation ; and the newspaper 
correspondents in particular were deeply im- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 297 

pressed by his airs and graces. They spoke 
and wrote of him habitually as " Lord Roscoe," 
and regarded his swagger as superb. The 
power, too, which at this time he undoubtedly 
wielded may be taken as affording some ex- 
cuse for their delusion. President Grant, who 
was rather famous for his misjudgment of men 
in civil life, gave his personal and political 
friendship to Mr. Conkling, and by allowing 
him to dictate the federal appointments in the 
State of New York, enabled him to play for 
several years the congenial role of political dic- 
tator. Thus with those who saw his " Olym- 
pian " bearing apparently quite justified by his 
possession of acquired power, there grew up 
an unquestioning belief in his greatness, and 
the tradition survived the wreck of his polit- 
ical fortunes. 

It was said of Mr. Conkling that while in 
Washington he had made himself proficient in 
boxing, and that he took the greatest delight 
in getting some inexperienced friend, who had 
not heard of his accomplishment, to put on the 
gloves for an amicable bout with him. Then 
would he buffet the unfortunate man most un- 
mercifully, and feel an exquisite joy in his own 
vast superiority as he knocked his victim about 
the room. This was a very characteristic trait. 



298 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

because it was so typical of a bully's nature. 
That he was, in fact, a bully was made per- 
fectly clear in many of the most important 
crises of his public life — a bully in his attempts 
to browbeat his way to the attainment of his 
ends, and a bully in his conduct when he en- 
countered a firm and manly opposition. 

The way in which he took Mr. Blaine's 
oratorical attack upon him is an excellent illus- 
tration, for it is the very first virtue of a poli- 
tician to accept with good-nature the punish- 
ment that he may receive in the course of his 
public career, and not to bear malice for any 
length of time ; whereas Mr. Conkling never 
forgave this verbal chastisement which he had 
neither the courage nor the ability to answer 
at the time, but which he stored up vindic- 
tively in his memory to make of it an excuse 
for many exhibitions of petty spite throughout 
the rest of his career. 

Another lamentable revelation of his real 
nature was that which he made before the 
Rochester Convention in 1877, when, on cer- 
tain questions of party policy, he came into 
conflict with Mr, George William Curtis, the 
gentlest, most dignified, and most courteous 
of men, and made a personal attack upon him 
which went completely over the line that sepa- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 299 

rates oratorical invective from ordinary black- 
guardism. Mr. Conkling's biographer, in chron- 
icling this unpleasant incident, quotes a eulogy 
upon the speech from the columns of a news- 
paper which regards it as one of the greatest 
in the whole annals of oratory, and compares 
Mr. Conkling with Pitt, Burke, and Sheridan ; 
but the biographer himself, while professing to 
reproduce the speech in full, expunges, out of 
shame, some of its phrases, and supplies their 
place with asterisks. 

Again, every one remembers his arrogant 
attempt, in the early days of the Garfield ad- 
ministration, to impose his will upon the Presi- 
dent and to stretch the senatorial prerogative 
until it should overshadow and in part destroy 
the independence of the Executive. Had it 
been only the amiable Garfield who confronted 
him in this attempt, he might have succeeded ; 
but here again, behind the President, stood his 
old antagonist, Mr. Blaine, then Secretary of 
State — cool, watchful, a master of fence, and 
wielding a weapon whose perfect temper made 
Conkling, with his clumsy bludgeon, appear the 
veriest tyro. Unable to carry his point, the 
Senator, like a sulky school-boy, resigned his 
seat, in the hope of a "vindication" at the 
hands of the New York Legislature, and there- 



300 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

by played into the hands of his opponent, who 
skilfully blocked the " vindication," and in the 
end brought about Mr. Conkling's political 
downfall. 

Yet, in spite of all these revelations of him- 
self, the tradition of his greatness still survived, 
until the myth obtained a final lodgment in the 
imagination of his countrymen, and the tradi- 
tion itself has now become a fixed belief in 
the minds of a great majority of the American 
people. 

If Mr. Conkling affords a good instance of 
an orator whose reputation has been unduly 
exalted in the popular mind. Senator Hill, of 
New York, may be taken as one who, on the 
whole, has had scant justice done him. This, 
also, is quite easily accounted for. A good 
deal of prejudice has sprung up in estimating 
his ability as a public speaker, from the circum- 
stance, now pretty generally admitted to be 
true, that he has at times delivered addresses 
that were not wholly original with himself — to 
put it plainly, that he has sometimes had his 
speeches written for him. Accepting this asser- 
tion as a fact, some explanation is necessary 
to show that in reality it should not seriously 
affect one's judgment of such speeches as are 
beyond any question all his own. 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 301 

In the first place, if the truth were known, 
it would probably be found that Mr. Hill is 
by no means singular in availing himself of 
another's aid in getting up some of his formal 
speeches. And though in our own country 
such a thing is generally held to be rather dis- 
creditable to an orator, in other countries it 
is accepted as a very ordinary incident. Few 
European monarchs, for example, ever make 
a speech of their own composition, but im- 
pressively pronounce the words that are care- 
fully prepared for them by their Ministers of 
State ; nor is this necessarily due to any in- 
ability on their part to give a fit expression 
to their own ideas, but because, having often 
to speak in places and on subjects of which 
they have themselves no minutely accurate 
knowledge, they make use of the special ex- 
perience of other men, lest by some careless 
phrase or indiscreet allusion they should give 
unintentional offence. The only exception that 
one easily recalls is the German Kaiser, whose 
utterances are absolutely his own, and are, from 
an oratorical point of view, often extremely 
picturesque and stirring. Yet this very excep- 
tion affords a strong justification of the rule 
adopted by his brother sovereigns ; for all Eu- 
rope is uneasy whenever it is known that he is 



302 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

expected to make a speech, and every one can 
recall a dozen instances when the over-frank 
expressions of the hare-brained War Lord have 
not only given grievous offence to other gov- 
ernments, but have excited the bitterest re- 
sentment among large sections of his own sub- 
jects. 

The rule holds good, also, of many person- 
ages whose position is less political than orna- 
mental. The Prince of Wales, for instance, a 
hundred times a year is expected to preside 
at functions where a speech from him is neces- 
sary — now at the meeting of a charitable soci- 
ety, now at the opening of a hospital, now at 
a dinner of artists or literary men or scientists, 
and now at some ceremonial more closely con- 
nected with the immediate interests of the 
State. It would be impossible for him to speak 
with pertinence and accuracy upon so many 
subjects requiring special knowledge and often 
special tact ; and, as a matter of fact, upon 
every one of these occasions his innocuous 
little speech is carefully prepared for him be- 
forehand by some discreet person who under- 
stands the situation and is able to infuse into 
the address the necessary amount of technical 
allusion and local appropriateness. Every one 
in England fully understands this, though the 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 303 

newspapers cherish a decorous fiction by oc- 
casional bursts of perfunctory enthusiasm over 
the Prince's gifts as a versatile and tactful 
speaker. In private, however, no one thinks 
it worth while to adopt this superstition, and 
the present writer knows of one individual 
who was once invited to prepare an address 
for the Prince to deliver before a gathering of 
archaeologists, and who, since then, pretty 
nearly always manages to bring a conversation 
around to the point where he can inform the 
company of the vast honor that was done him 
in asking him to play the part of oratorical 
jackal to his Royal Highness. Nor is this 
vicarious eloquence despised by foreign states- 
men generally. When the subject on which 
they have to speak is one in which they are 
personally interested or with which they are 
already especially familiar, they trust to their 
own resources and their own inspiration ; but 
in other cases the departmental clerk or the 
convenient, and often very able, private secre- 
tary gets up the facts and provides the back- 
bone of the speech, and frequently also much 
of its actual flesh and blood, in the way of 
argument and phrase and rhetorical embellish- 
ment. It is likely, too, that, as said above, 
our own statesmen are not in reality so very 



304 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

different from their foreign brethren. One 
of the oldest and most respected members 
of Congress once showed me the manuscript 
of an address that he was going to dehver 
on the subject of the tariff, and casually re- 
marked : 

" My son-in-law did that, and a very good 
speech it is, too." 

The writer ventured to ask, knowing him 
very well, whether all his political speeches 
were from the same source. 

" Oh no," he answered. " Only, you see, I 
don't care a straw myself about the tariff ques- 
tion, and he is full of it ; so I just asked him 
to get up the speech." 

Consequently, it must not be viewed as a 
serious charge against Mr. Hill if he has fol- 
lowed the many distinguished precedents that 
are at hand. There is in his case a broad dis- 
tinction to be drawn between the various ora- 
tions that he has from time to time delivered ; 
and this line of demarcation is to be fixed by 
remembering a perfectly obvious truth in con- 
nection with his political career. Mr. Hill's 
early training and his long possession of party 
leadership in the State of New York produced 
a very natural effect in making the politics of 
that State more personally interesting to him 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 305 

than those which arc connected with national 
affairs. He is in this respect the natural suc- 
cessor of Mr. Tildcn, knowing thoroughly ev- 
ery district of the State, every local politician 
of importance, the history of every issue and 
of every movement for a quarter of a century; 
and he can gauge to a dot the motives and the 
measures of enemy and friend alike. This sort 
of thing has by many been described in a con- 
temptuous but rather telling phrase as " peanut 
politics"; yet those who use the term forget 
that New York State, with its fifty thousand 
square miles of area, its six millions of inhab- 
itants, its enormous wealth, and its vast com- 
mercial interests, is a political entity of far 
greater importance than many of the minor 
European kingdoms ; and that what they sneer 
at in Mr. Hill they would commend as states- 
manship in a Dutch or Danish or Norwegian 
politician. It is, in fact, only by comparison 
with the immensity of our whole great national 
domain that the local interests of New York 
seem relatively unimportant. 

However this may be, it is certain that Mr. 
Hill, when first elected to the Senate, went 
very reluctantly to Washington, and only as a 
pis aller ; that for a long time he felt politi- 
cally homesick in his new and untried sur- 
20 



306 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

roundings; and that, as was entirely natural, 
he could not all at once get fully into touch 
with the men and the measures that he had 
hitherto, like the rest of us, looked at only 
from a distance. Consequently, when it be- 
came necessary for Senator Hill to speak upon 
questions that were still to him comparatively 
unfamiliar, he felt a very natural mistrust of 
his own ability to avoid the pitfalls that were 
certain to be dug for him ; and if he then 
availed himself of another's aid we need not 
blame him overmuch. That which does, how- 
ever, call for censure is the wretched choice he 
must have made of a collaborator, for the first 
set speech pronounced by him before the Senate 
is one of the most ghastly things that the rec- 
ords of Congressional oratory can show. In it 
Mr. Hill was so ill-advised as to attempt a 
humorous role, and to string together a lot of 
wretched puns upon the names of the leading 
New York newspapers — the Sun, the World, 
the Times, the Tribime, and so forth — the 
effect of which was painful and pathetic to a 
degree. Even the opposition journals passed 
it over lightly, so melancholy was the spectacle 
that the Senator afforded ; and they gave him 
the benefit of the charity which men accord to 
those who have lately died. » 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 307 

Mr. Hill never again made himself responsi- 
ble for anything so unfortunate as this ; yet 
one may, in general, set aside, when consider- 
ing his oratorical ability, those speeches that 
belong to the period of his first entrance upon 
the field of national politics. In them he had 
to do with themes that had not yet begun to 
interest him, and in discussing them he show- 
ed the intellectual gmicJicrie of one who is ill 
at ease amid unusual surroundings. 

It is not likely that there are many who 
really lay much stress upon Mr. Hill's ability 
as an orator, no matter what his subject ; and 
if oratory be so defined as to include only the 
impassioned and emotional forms of public 
speaking, then there is little or nothing to be 
said in his behalf. But no such restricted def- 
inition is reasonable ; and with a broader stand- 
ard of judgment it is likely that Mr. Hill de- 
serves some serious consideration as an orator. 
Whenever he has had to advocate a policy 
which concerned the things that were nearest 
to his own heart, or to defend a course of action 
taken by him in relation to the affairs of his 
own State, he has shown no small power of ex- 
position and argument and persuasion. When, 
as. Governor, he from time to time addressed 
great audiences on State affairs, he often rose 



3o8 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

to a high level. The theme was a congenial 
one ; he knew it thoroughly ; and his audi- 
ences were gathered, not to be amazed or 
thrilled or startled, but to be convinced. Un- 
der such conditions Mr. Hill's efforts were 
models of earnest, lucid, and straightforward 
speech, and their effect in gaining him a popu- 
lar support was undeniable. A life-long Re- 
publican, who is also a gentleman of great 
cultivation and critical ability, once met the 
present writer soon after attending a meet- 
ing at which Governor Hill had spoken, and, 
in answer to a question, said : 

" He seems to me to speak with very great 
ability and force, and after hearing him I am 
convinced that he is thoroughly sincere." 

Now, as political sincerity is the very last 
virtue with which Mr. Hill's enemies would 
be willing to credit him, it must be admitted 
that to produce an impression such as this 
upon a prejudiced opponent is evidence of 
genuine oratorical power. It was, however, a 
great tactical mistake when, at the Chicago 
Convention of 1896, Mr. Hill was put for- 
ward by the gold men as their chief orator. 
Wholly unimpassioned at all times, excite- 
ment on the part of those about him seems 
always to make him colder and more unbend- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 309 

ing still, and on this occasion his manner was 
one of absolute frigidity. The address he made 
was wholly argumentative, a pure appeal to 
reason, and one which, if pronounced before 
a deliberative body, would have had consider- 
able weight. But in these days a national con- 
vention is no longer a deliberative body. With 
the galleries packed by a yelling mob, and the 
floor filled by a surging mass of delegates fran- 
tic with excitement, mere argument and reason 
make no impression ; and only the orator who 
can appeal to sentiment and passion can ob- 
tain the mastery, and rule by the power of 
words that burn and blaze their way to the 
mind through the path of the emotions. 

It is doubtful whether even the warmest 
friends of ex-President Cleveland regard him as 
an orator; and it may therefore seem a waste 
of time to speak of him in dealing with a sub- 
ject such as this. Nothing, indeed, could be 
more remote from eloquence than his infre- 
quent political addresses. Couched in poly- 
syllabic words that clumsily clog themselves 
into sentences of more than Johnsonian pon- 
derosity, Mr. Cleveland's ideas when given in 
a public speech are nearly always found to 
be distinctly platitudinous. That the citizen 
should always cherish virtue, that unbridled 



3IO SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

selfishness and greed are serious dangers to 
the body politic, that intelligence and public 
spirit are especially desirous in a Republic — 
such are the by no means startling and origi- 
nal thoughts that appear and reappear in Mr. 
Cleveland's deliverances. The only question 
that arises in one's mind is whether this enu- 
meration of the baldest truisms must be ac- 
cepted as the best thing that the ex-President 
can do in the way of oratory, or whether this 
style has been deliberately selected by him as 
being ultimately the wisest means of accom- 
plishing a distinct and definite object. It has 
been very shrewdly pointed out (I think by 
Mr. E. L. Godkin) that for a statesman who is 
seeking public confidence rather than popular 
admiration, this rather tame and unoriginal 
vein is exceedingly judicious; and I am in- 
clined to believe that there is much to be said 
in favor of such an hypothesis. There is noth- 
ing, in fact, that the average citizen so much 
distrusts as mere brilliancy in a public man. 
He is not brilliant himself, and he has a vague 
suspicion that one who is so extremely clever 
may be altogether too clever to be trusted. 
He will admire him immensely, but he will be 
always just the least bit afraid of him. On 
the other hand, a statesman who is prosaic, and 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 3II 

apparently even a little dull, and who will roll 
out plenty of good sound morality in a com- 
fortable jog-trot way, with nothing to startle 
or to excite, appeals very strongly to the rep- 
resentative citizen. It reminds him of his min- 
ister (good man !) who, to be sure, puts him 
regularly to sleep, but under whose ministra- 
tions he feels that he can sleep with perfect 
safety, knowing that no theological fences will 
be broken down and no fine old dogmas shat- 
tered. This is precisely the reason why our 
Presidents have nearly always been selected 
because they were " safe " men rather than 
political geniuses ; and it may be that Mr. 
Cleveland, who is by no means lacking in 
shrewdness, has framed his oratorical style 
with this very thought in mind. 

There are, indeed, some indications that 
did he but choose he might give utterance to 
speeches in quite a different style. Not many 
of our Presidents have been known as makers 
of epigrams or as fashioners of phrases; yet of 
these few Mr. Cleveland ranks next to Presi- 
dent Lincoln and President Grant. Some of 
the sentences and verbal combinations con- 
tained in his letters and messages are exceed- 
ingly crisp and pointed, and, in fact, they long 
ago obtained a wide popular currency. Such 



312 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

is his famous maxim, "Public office is a public 
trust," which Mr. Dana, of the Sun, declares 
to be not original with Mr. Cleveland ; but as 
nothing in this world is in reality original, this 
criticism need not be taken very seriously. 
Every one recalls the expressions "innocuous 
desuetude," " offensive partisanship," " perni- 
cious activity," and " ghoulish glee." Perhaps 
we should also include "the communism of 
pelf," a phrase exploited in his message to 
Congress in 1888, though precisely what it 
really means must remain uncertain. In some 
of his State papers, also, while the form is still 
Johnsonian, there may be found a point and 
vivacity not visible in his formal speeches. 
Several of his pension vetoes, in which he 
exposed the absurdity of some malingering 
claimant's case, were very neatly put. His 
Venezuela message, too, was a bit of English 
of which any one might be proud ; and one of 
the London journals, even while condemning 
the substance of it with great severity, felt 
bound to speak of its language as marked by 
"stateliness and force." 

Finally, in several of his non-political speech- 
es, when he perhaps felt less restraint in saying 
what he had to say, there are passages which 
abandon altogether the portentous and truistic 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 313 

vein and exhibit quite unusual qualities. Such 
passages may be found in the speech that he 
made at the Harvard celebration in 1886. In 
the intensely academic atmosphere of that in- 
teresting occasion, surrounded as he was by 
scholars and men whose university associations 
united them in a bond of intellectual brother- 
hood, Mr. Cleveland spoke very simply and 
naturally of his own regret that the circum- 
stances of his life had given him no Alma 
Mater; and in what he said there was a certain 
suggestion of wistfulness, conveyed with great 
dignity and good taste, that touched the hearts 
of all who heard him. On just one occasion 
Mr. Cleveland has shown that he possesses a 
fund of quaint humor and a gift for its expres- 
sion. This was in 1891, at a local celebration 
near his former home on Cape Cod, when Mr. 
Cleveland put aside his sesquipedalian manner 
altogether and spoke just as a neighbor speaks 
to neighbors, with perfect naturalness and ease, 
and with many touches of quiet fun that one 
may look for in vain in his other public utter- 
ances. There was nothing the least forced about 
it all, and it revealed a genial side to his char- 
acter that was very winning. Altogether, then, 
one may rightly hold that Mr. Godkin's hy- 
pothesis (if indeed the hypothesis be Mr. God- 



314 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

kin's) is very plausible ; and that Mr. Cleveland 
may actually have adopted a labored and con- 
ventional style of oratory from a desire to win 
confidence rather than applause, and to avoid 
the snares that beset the possessor of a too 
conspicuous cleverness. 

If this was really his serious intention, he 
was perhaps confirmed in it through the awful 
example afforded by Mr. Chauncey M. Depew. 
Mr. Depew, as every one knows, possesses a 
rare union of sound judgment, vivid imagina- 
tion, and lively wit, and is an adept in the art 
of putting things to the multitude. In the 
early seventies it looked as though he intended 
to cultivate this ^jft in a serious wav and to 
develop a style in which judgment and imag- 
ination should be the chief elements, with hu- 
mor strictly subordinated to the other more 
solid qualities. Had he done so, there is no 
doubt that he would have exercised a very 
marked political influence. But either because 
his defeat in New York State in 1872 put him 
out of conceit with a purely political career, 
or because the temptation to say good things 
overpowered his discretion, he presently took 
up the line of after-dinner speaking, with which 
his name is now so generally associated. His 
after-dinner speeches are among the best of 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 315 

their kind ; but to be known first of all as an 
after-dinner speaker is to abandon any claim 
upon serious consideration. Once in a while 
Mr. Depew will speak at length and with ear- 
nestness upon some weighty theme, and will 
speak most admirably, but his hearers hardly 
relish such an innovation, and persist in re- 
garding him (we use the word in no offensive 
sense) as a sort of public jester. This means 
the negation of any real influence; for no ora- 
tory can seriously sway the mind when each 
person present, as he settles himself down 
comfortably in his chair at the entrance of the 
orator, displays upon his countenance the pre- 
monitory flicker of an expectant grin. 

Perhaps the best contemporaneous example 
of self-restraint, and ease, and perfect taste in 
public oratory is to be found in some of the 
addresses of ex -President Harrison. As a 
speaker he is an instance of the curious devel- 
opment that seems to attend the occupancy 
of the presidential office. Before his election 
he had for many years been in public life and 
had spoken much ; yet no one ever regarded 
him as having any especial facility as an orator. 
In fact, while in the Senate he once made use 
of .the expression, " I lift up a prayer " — a form 
of locution which suggests the stereotyped 



3l6 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

vocabulary of the country prayer- meeting ; 
and the Post of this city caught it up and rang 
the changes on it until the only thing that a 
mention of Mr. Harrison suggested to many 
intelligent citizens was the act of *' lifting up 
a prayer." Nevertheless, as President, he never 
made a flat or feeble speech ; but, on the con- 
trary, surprised the whole country by the 
finish and ease of all his public utterances. 
Especially notable were the brief addresses 
that he made during his presidential progress 
across the continent, and above all to the audi- 
ences that met him in the Southern States. 
Here he was surrounded by those who were 
politically his opponents and against whom he, 
as a soldier, had fought in the days of the Civil 
War. It was no easy matter to speak a score 
of times under conditions such as these with- 
out saying anything to give offence, or else 
descending to the most <^«««/ conventionalities. 
Yet Mr. Harrison never once did either, but 
rose above all criticism in a series of little 
speeches that are perfect gems in their way — 
graceful, winning, suggestive, and tactful to a 
degree. In the longer addresses that he made 
during his tenure of the presidency, the same 
qualities are always present. One recalls es- 
pecially his speech before the Peace Congress 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 317 

at Washington, which was an oration marked 
by equal dignity and urbanity, expressing as 
it did a sympathetic approval of the aims of 
his auditors while holding fast, as became the 
guardian of the national honor, to the view 
that, under existing conditions, the sword is 
often the best auxiliary of the olive-branch. 

Taking a retrospective glance at recent 
American history, it is probable that of all the 
speakers who have been heard in the national 
forum during the past quarter of a century, 
the most naturally gifted orator was General 
Garfield. He had, indeed, many advantages 
that other politicians have not often shared. 
In the first place, he was one who, as Presi- 
dents go, must be regarded as a man of un- 
usual cultivation. This attribute need not, in- 
deed, be pressed too hard nor made too much 
of, for it had its obvious limitations. He re- 
ceived, to be sure, while young, a college train- 
ing; but it is not likely that anything more 
than a glimmering of real culture could have 
been imparted by Williams College as it was 
some forty years ago, in spite of Mr. Garfield's 
own much -quoted but rather absurd saying 
about Mark Hopkins and the pine table. That 
he subsequently exhibited attainments which 
are rare among politicians is quite true ; yet 



3l8 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

now and then the h'mitations already men- 
tioned would still appear and bear evidence 
to the difficulty of escaping from early influ- 
ences. Mr. Garfield had been at one time and 
for a number of years a teacher, and in private 
life something of the pedagogue kept always 
cropping up in his fondness for advising his 
friends as to what they ought to read, and in 
his readiness to correct small errors of pro- 
nunciation and of syntax. 

This trait was curiously illustrated not long 
before his death in an occurrence that, when 
one considers the occasion, was almost gro- 
tesque. Soon after Guiteau had fired the 
shot that was to prove so fatal, and while 
General Garfield lay on his bed tormented 
with ceaseless pain, a friend who had been 
admitted to the room spoke a few words of 
comfort. 

" Mr. President," he said, " this thing has 
blotted out all party feeling in the nation. 
Every American to-day feels the deepest 
sympathy for you." 

The sufferer turned his face and spoke with 
difficulty in a low, gasping voice : 

" Sympathy with,'' said he, " not sympathy 
for." 

And later, when his death had been pro- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 319 

nounced inevitable, and some one asked him 
to write a line with his name, as a last gift, he 
traced these words : 

Strangtilatus pro reptiblica. 

Now, it was a little odd that at such a moment 
he should have chosen to express himself in 
Latin, and that, having chosen Latin, he 
should employ this particular verb strangu- 
larc, which, in the sense here given it, is per- 
fectly classical and good, but somewhat rare. 
It showed, indeed, his learning, but it showed 
a certain pedantry as well. 

Not always, however, did he have his erudi- 
tion quite so well in hand. In the course of 
his speech at the National Convention of 1880, 
when he presented the name of Senator Sher- 
man, he compared himself and his delegation 
to Leonidas and the devoted band at Ther- 
mopylae, concluding with the words : 

" And we shall stand firmly here, no matter 
how many Greeks you may bring against us." 

Which makes it clear that, for the moment 
at least, his Greeks and his Persians were very 
badly mixed. 

At times, also, some slight evidences of de- 
fective taste were to be noticed by the careful 
observer. We are inclined to describe as such 



320 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

the scene when, after taking the inaugural oath 
upon the steps of the Capitol, he turned and 
kissed his mother, who was seated just behind 
him. Of course, from one point of view, this 
thing was mighty fine, and it threw the edi- 
tors of Sunday-school papers, both here and in 
England, into a prolonged ecstasy : yet we 
rather doubt whether in reality it was quite 
so fine after all ; for, apart from its being just 
the least bit too theatric, it most inappropri- 
ately injected the purely domestic relations of 
an individual into the midst of a supremely 
national ceremony, and one in which the state- 
liness and dignity of a great public function 
ought to have been the only thing before all 
minds. 

However, with these few reservations, it 
may be unhesitatingly asserted that Mr. Gar- 
field was, by nature and by training alike, a 
most impressive orator. Next to Jefferson, 
and perhaps John Quincy Adams, he was of 
all our Presidents the most highly trained ; 
and next to Mr. Arthur, who succeeded him, 
he was the most of a man of the world. Wide 
reading, travel, and long intercourse with men 
of every type had given him a broad and com- 
prehensive outlook ; and unlike most of our 
pubhc men, he had thought out for himself the 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 32 1 

views, both economic and political, that he 
advocated ; nor did he shuffle about in the 
currents of changing opinion, as do those poli- 
ticians who have no convictions of their own, 
but wait subserviently upon the caprices of 
the mob. He led rather than followed ; and 
this is why his speeches in Congress were not 
mere ephemeral splurges, but are to this day 
continually quoted for their apt and lucid 
statement of fundamental truths. Unlike oth- 
er party leaders, also, there was nothing petty 
or personal in his treatment of political oppo- 
nents. He struck hard blows, but they were 
fair, and left no bitterness behind. As a man, 
he made no enemies by his oratory ; and he 
gave the impression of a spirit too broad and 
too nobly generous for petty altercations. Mr. 
Garfield was singularly fortunate also in his 
personal endowments. Gifted with a fine 
presence, a resonant and expressive voice, 
and an easy and singularly winning manner, 
he charmed his listeners from the very first 
sentences of an oration. He had, too, a cer- 
tain sensuousness of temperament which with 
a different environment and early training 
might easily have developed into sensuality, 
but which, in fact, merely imparted a richness 
and warmth to his utterances, and indicated 
21 



32 2 SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 

only the virility which is absolutely essential 
to the successful orator, and which was so 
noticeable in Webster and in Clay. With all 
these qualities, then, both natural and ac- 
quired, Mr. Garfield stood forth, I think, as 
the very greatest of recent American orators ; 
and all his speeches, whether they be his care- 
fully prepared deliverances in the halls of Con- 
gress or his spontaneous utterances upon the 
stump, are vivid, clean-cut, and forceful to a 
degree, marked everywhere by thought and 
imagination, with a certain large and luminous 
quality about them, and often rising into splen- 
did and stirring eloquence. 

Altogether, then, it is not easy to believe 
that the days of oratory have departed for- 
ever, that orators are born no more, and that 
men can never again be roused to action by 
the arts of eloquence ; but, as has been al- 
ready stated, I believe that to-day it is only 
the occasion and theme that are momenta- 
rily lacking. Human nature does not change 
from generation to generation ; but its impulses 
and its elemental motives still remain the same. 
As it has always been true in the past, so will 
it always, I believe, be true throughout the fut- 
ure, that when great bodies of men are stirred 
by intense emotion and when the wind of pas- 



SOME NOTES ON POLITICAL ORATORY 323 

sion is blowing over human hearts, then will 
the fire once more descend and touch the lips 
of some born orator, who will, as heretofore, 
smite down all opposition, take reason and im- 
agination captive, and impose his single will on 
all who hear him, by the indescribable magic 
of the spoken word. 



THE DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN 
EDUCATION 



THE DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN 
EDUCATION* 

For thirty years the development of Amer- 
ican education has been almost wholly influ- 
enced by German teaching and example. Ever 
since the termination of the Civil War our stu- 
dents, in numbers that increase each year, have 
sought to supplement the training given them 
at home by spending one or more semesters at 
the German universities ; the paedagogical ideas 
of German educators have been made accessi- 
ble to everyone through paraphrases and trans- 
lations ; the German methods have been uni- 
versally accepted as the very best and soundest 
known ; until at last we find the whole profes- 
sion of American teachers leavened through 
and through by German thought. 

This powerful and undisputed influence has 
been in many ways productive of a vast amount 

* For permission to reprint this paper, acknowledgments 
are due to Mr. John Brisben Walker, of the Cosmopolitan 
Magazine, in which it originally appeared. 



328 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

of good. In the first place, it has helped our 
people to cut loose in all their intellectual life 
and scholarly work from that ancient bondage 
to English tradition which was received and 
perpetuated throughout the long-protracted 
period of American colonialism. For English 
scholarship, as it existed a century or more 
ago, when Gray and Gibbon styled the Eng- 
lish universities " the home of bats and owls," 
was in many ways a thing of elegant sterility ; 
and as handed down from generation to gen- 
eration in our country, it wholly lost its ele- 
gance and intensified its sterility. In the sec- 
ond place, the German influence taught the 
practical and scientific value of thoroughness 
— of all lessons the very hardest for Americans 
to learn. The slipshod, happy-go-lucky opti- 
mism of our people, eager for quick results and 
careless about perfection of form and accuracy 
of detail, was nowhere, indeed, so unhappily 
visible as in our scholarship. Isolated as 
Americans long remained from all immediate 
contact with an older and more finished civili- 
zation, they found it difficult to admit that 
anything was better than their best ; and hence 
mere show and superficial cleverness passed 
current with the undiscriminating many, de- 
priving them of any serious standards of com- 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 329 

parison and cursing them with the fatuous 
self-complacency that is so fatal to all high 
achievement. 

It was a revelation, then, to those stray pio- 
neers of higher education who early in the 
sixties made their way to Heidelberg and 
Gottingen and Berlin to find at these great 
centres of learning what was to them a new 
and unknown intellectual life ; to meet illus- 
trious teachers who did not go over and over 
again with a monotonous NacJibcterei the rudi- 
mentary precepts of a text-book, but took for 
granted at the start the widest range of read- 
ing in their hearers ; to watch investigators 
who set themselves the task of bringing to 
light what was unknown before, in laying bare 
the hidden, and augmenting by their work the 
sum of human knowledge ; and to see gather- 
ed about these men a body of learners aflame 
with the noble enthusiasm of those whose ideal 
lies in the maximum and not in the minimum 
of achievement, and who fling themselves with 
all the passion of an intellectual crusade into 
the work of creative effort and discovery. 

As a result of this new light upon methods 
of teaching and of learning, the old traditions 
of American education were swept away for- 
ever. The colleges and universities were nat- 



33° DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

urally the first to experience the change, and 
then, as their students went out into the schools 
and into the community at large, the whole 
mass was leavened until, as I have said above, 
our intellectual world was Germanized. A very 
important adjunct of this change, and one that 
made its swift accomplishment more easy, was 
the enormous increase of the German element 
in our population. In many of our larger 
cities the proportion of citizens of German 
birth is to-day actually in excess of the native- 
born, and there are several States even where 
the same preponderance prevails. It is there- 
fore natural, as it is actually true, that the 
German influence already noticed should not 
only have been able to affect most radically 
the American methods and theory of educa- 
tion, but that it should have extended to a 
wider sphere and set its mark upon our social 
and political philosophy. That in a single 
generation a hitherto unknown interest in 
German paedagogical doctrine should spring 
up ; that the German language should dispute 
with French its old-time place in the favor of 
cultivated men and women ; and that German 
literature should now be taught and read al- 
most as widely as the more attractive literature 
of France — these are but the superficial signs 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 33 1 

of a very vital change. It is not too much 
to say that the influence of German thought, 
though directed first of all to a single phase 
of our development, has struck its roots down 
far more deeply ; and that, aided by an ethnic 
change in our population, it has in reality 
effected a profound and somewhat startling 
alteration in the national character. 

The American of a century ago was much 
more purely Anglo-Saxon than he is to-day. 
He still felt the dislike of all control, the im- 
patience of restraint, and the strong individu- 
alism that had driven his ancestors from the 
England of Charles II., and that afterwards 
united them to defy the England of George 
III. Exulting in a sense of unrestricted free- 
dom and an almost lawless largeness of vision, 
he felt himself equal to anything whatever. 
He had hewn out a home for himself with his 
own right arm, subduing the savage, the wild 
beast, and the illimitable forest ; and he looked 
about him with something of the superb self- 
consciousness of a god, as he saw that his 
handiwork was very good. He was not a 
creature of rules and regulations ; the most 
elemental principles of right and justice alone 
made up his simple code. He felt that char- 
acter and energy together could accomplish 



332 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

anything, and he laughed to scorn the thought 
of dependence upon any one. And even later, 
in the early years of the present century, one 
notes the evidences of an extreme particular- 
ism. In political life we see prolonged the era 
of the small self-governing community, the era 
of the town-meeting, with a semi-patriarchal 
importance given to the family ; and in a wider 
field the sentiment of nationality still slumber- 
ing, a tenacious adherence to the doctrine of 
States' Rights, a distrust of centralization, and, 
in general, a firm belief in Jefferson's dictum, 
that " the best government of all is the one 
that governs least." So sturdily independent, 
so resentful even of favors, were Americans 
then that an English traveller records her as- 
tonishment on visiting the House of Repre- 
sentatives to see " member after member leap- 
ing to his feet to denounce with passionate 
indignation a bill which proposed to grant 
from the national treasury a sum of money 
for the development and extension of a system 
of public roads." The American feeling of 
that day was, in fact, most admirably typified in 
Daniel Boone, who needed nothing but his axe 
and rifle for his maintenance, and who felt that 
he was being stifled if he found another white 
man settling down within a hundred miles of 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 333 

him. It was an apotheosis of individuahty, of 
self-reliance, and of personal power. 

The German influence and the general al- 
teration in the racial character of our people 
through incessant immigration have effectually 
changed all that ; and to understand the change, 
one must consider for a moment what the 
mental attitude of the German really is. The 
typical German of the educated class is one 
who separates entirely his intellectual from 
his material life. He ascribes so much im- 
portance to the former, he has so much en- 
thusiasm for its cult, that he views it as being 
in itself sufificient for the fulfilment of all his 
aspirations. Political conditions have for cen- 
turies intensified this tendency by excluding 
him from any really independent share in the 
larger public life, and thus forcing him back 
into his study or his lecture-room to think and 
theorize the more, because it is forbidden him 
to act. His life is, therefore, one of thought 
and not of action, and never is his thought 
conditioned by the various necessities that con- 
front the man who tries to translate theory 
into terms of practice. Hence, it is always 
enough for the German if his notions be quite 
scientifically correct, if they be logical and 
lucid, if they be capable, in fact, of a sort of 



334 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

mathematical demonstration. He makes no 
allowance in his scheme for any difficulties 
that would attend its application by reason of 
the passions or the prejudices or the tempera- 
mental differences of actual men and women ; 
for the personal equation has no place in his 
large and luminous philosophy, nor are the 
very unphilosophical facts of life permitted to 
disturb the symmetry of his hypothesis. That 
good old story of the German who was asked 
to write a paper about lions, and who had 
never seen or heard of lions, but who at once 
shut himself up in a darkened room until such 
time as he should have evolved the true con- 
ception of a lion from his inner consciousness, 
gives us in a humorous way a very faithful 
illustration of the German's mental attitude 
towards life. To him all problems whatsoever, 
whether social or political or philosophical, 
may be solved by taking thought ; and the 
true solution is always capable of being sum- 
med up in a formula. If anything is wrong 
in life it is because the necessary formula for 
its amendment has not yet been properly 
worked out. If there are misery and sin and 
poverty and crime perceptible on every hand, 
all that is needed to banish them is a knowl- 
edge of the formula. If the State is nearly 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 335 

shipwrecked by misgovcrnment or by the hos- 
tility of foreign powers, a simple formula will 
set it right. Even character and morals and 
temperament are reducible to formulaic treat- 
ment ; and a true German, like Max Nordau, 
will discover an incipient criminal in the great- 
est genius by simply getting at the measure- 
ments of the base of his head, by examining 
the tips of his ears, and by collecting the sta- 
tistics of his similes and metaphors. 

It is precisely here that American thought 
to-day displays most strikingly the German in- 
fluence. The cult of the formula has taken 
root among us, and the extravagance of our 
national devotion to it is proportionate to the 
energy, and also to the childishness, of the 
American people. The old-time American 
knew nothing about formulas. He had no pre- 
conceived and axiomatic theories about the 
precise way in which things should be done. 
He waited until the necessity came for doing 
a particular thing, and then he just did it and 
made no fuss about it. Take the drafting of 
our national Constitution, for example. Of the 
men who framed it, scarcely one was a politi- 
cal philosopher according to the German un- 
derstanding of the term. They brought to 
their task no carefully elaborated outfit of sci- 



336 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

entific abstractions. They had simply studied 
the political conditions that existed ; they un- 
derstood the history and the temper of the 
people ; they grasped at once the practical 
difficulties and the practical possibilities of the 
problem, and they did their work accordingly. 
Any able German thinker could, probably, in 
half an hour point out a hundred absolutely 
fatal defects in the Constitution which these 
statesmen framed ; yet it has none the less en- 
dured, with scarce a change, down to the pres- 
ent day, and the experience of every decade 
only deepens the admiration with which men 
view this splendid national charter, which has 
served as a model for every republic founded 
since that time. On the other hand, the Ger- 
mans had a chance in 1848 to show what 
government by formula is like. The political 
philosophers swarmed in the Frankfort Assem- 
bly of that year. No one could doubt the 
profundity of their learning ; they produced 
some of the most beautiful formulas that even 
Germany had been called on to admire ; yet 
in just about six months the whole thing went 
to smash, and ever since that day the German 
people have cowei^ed meekly down beneath the 
booted heel of a military despotism such as a 
typical Anglo-Saxon people would reduce to 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 337 

pulp in the space of twenty-four good working 
hours. 

But the modified American of to-day is as 
form.ula-ridden as any German ever was. He 
has worked out two general formulaic reme- 
dies for everything. In the sphere of politics 
and economics he has set up for himself the 
legislative formula as an infallible panacea ; 
while questions of every other sort he solves 
by the application of the educational formula. 
The legislative formula is supposed to be a 
substitute for the qualities that made the old- 
time American precisely what he was — for 
thrift and energy and self-reliance. The for- 
mula itself is an invocation of that mysterious 
and hazily defined Omnipotence which men 
impersonally call " the State," and which, in' 
some inexplicable way, is supposed to have all 
power in heaven and earth to make men pros- 
perous and happy, if only the appropriate for- 
mula can be devised in the shape of legislation. 
Thus we find in certain sections of the country 
the law invoked to make men temperate and 
sober ; in others, to make them chaste ; in still 
another, the Ten Commandments are to be 
enacted into statute law to make religion uni- 
versal. If men, by reason of their own unthrift 
and reckless management, have lost their credit 



338 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

at the banks, a law must instantly create new 
institutions for the special purpose of discount- 
ing all their paper. If, because of various eco- 
nomic conditions, the market prices of their 
products fall, a vote of Congress must at once 
reverse the universal laws of trade and screw 
up prices to a given figure. If money be scarce, 
the legislative formula will make it plenty, and 
assure to every man a comfortable balance at 
the bank. The American farmer of a century 
ago, if floods destroyed his crops or pestilence 
destroyed his cattle, just saved and worked and 
practiced self-denial till he had made good his 
losses. The American farmer of to-day does 
nothing of the kind. He simply lets his hair 
grow long and starts a new political party. In 
fact, though we call it in this country by an- 
other name, the spirit of American political 
theory to-day in every party is the helpless 
spirit of State Socialism — a purely German 
product, and one that has been spawned and 
nourished by the legislative formula. 

The educational formula is equally in evi- 
dence among us. Just as the legislative for- 
mula is to make men prosperous and happy, 
so the educational formula is to make them 
wise and virtuous. Education can do any- 
thing, we are told, and every one is capable of 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 339 

being educated, just as any one is capable of 
being made an educator. It is a revival of 
the old Socratic maxim that no one will vol- 
untarily go wrong if he only knows the better 
way. And in this the formulaic method is fol- 
lowed all along the line. There is first the edu- 
cational formula itself, the alkahest, the uni- 
versal solvent of our intellectual alchemists. 
Then there is the formula for making the first 
formula known, and the formula for inculcat- 
ing the other formula ; so that to-day we have 
teachers who teach teachers to teach other 
teachers how to teach. Everything is worked 
out to the last degree of scientific exactness. 
The individual idiosyncrasy of the learner does 
not count. There is a psychological formula 
which reduces all intellects and all capacities 
to a common denominator, and everything can 
now be done by a set of scientific rules, from 
the time required per diem for teaching each 
division and subdivision of a topic to the pre- 
cise manner in which that topic must be taught, 
almost down to the cut of the teacher's clothes. 
Formerly it was believed that there must be a 
certain adaptability in the instructor, a certain 
regard for the needs of the individual learner ; 
but that has been done away with now. In 
these da}'s the scientific educator in the pri- 



340 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

maiy schools draws spidery little diagrams, in 
which a crooked line goes wriggling up a sort 
of trellis ; and this psychological horoscope, all 
carefully marked out in accordance with a set 
of definite rules, saves every one a world of 
trouble in deciding on his methods. Educa- 
tion nowadays, in fact, is being desiccated and 
formulated and reduced to the compact and 
convenient shape of a set of logarithmic tables. 
All this, of course, is here quite strongly put. 
In detail and in particular instances it is sub- 
ject to qualifications and exceptions ; but as 
a characterization of existing tendencies it is 
absolutely true. 

A natural corollary of such a state of doctrine 
is the popular assumption that anything what- 
ever can be taught. Hence comes a proposi- 
tion which is logically sound enough and theo- 
retically unobjectionable : that in the rapidly 
expanding curricula of our colleges and uni- 
versities those subjects of instruction should 
appear which bear directly on the personal wel- 
fare of the student in his future life, and that 
his moral and social, as well as his intellectual, 
needs should be provided for. If we teach him 
languages and literatures and philosophy and 
history to make him an accomplished gentle- 
man, and if we teach him chemistry and me- 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 341 

chanical engineering to enable him to earn an 
income, why not also teach him those things 
that are vastly more important for his real hap- 
piness? Why should not the young and in- 
experienced undergraduate in the formative 
period of his early life learn from the lips of 
university instructors everything that makes 
for a rational, virtuous, and successful life — 
how to preserve his health, how to resist temp- 
tation, how to choose his profession, how to 
avoid mistakes in business, how to invest his 
money, how to select a wife, how to bring up 
children, and how to grow old gracefully? 
These things are really most important — they 
are even vital ; and why should not the uni- 
versities make the teaching of them a matter 
of most serious concern ? Why not, indeed ? 
The thought is very beautiful and pleasing. 
In fact, if all the blessings of the legislative 
formula shall finally be added to the equally 
beneficent effects of the educational formula, 
what a glorious world this world of ours will 
be ! When legislation finally assures to every 
citizen a princely income, and makes him chaste 
and temperate and earnestly religious, and 
when education gives him perfect wisdom, un- 
broken health, a thoroughly congenial occu- 
pation, exemption from all business troubles. 



342 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

a fascinating wife, and children that shall fill 
his heart with pride, then truly we shall all be 
living, not merely in Utopia, but in Paradise. 

The great defect in all this sort of argument, 
so far as it relates to education, is precisely 
that which vitiates so many of the German 
theories. It takes no notice whatsoever of the 
facts of man's experience, and it is based upon 
the fallacy that all possible subjects of teaching 
stand upon precisely the same basis. It does 
not carefully distinguish, as one is ultimately 
forced to do, between the facts of which a 
purely intellectual knowledge is sufficient to 
afford a reasonable grasp and those other facts 
to which this knowledge can of itself give no 
real practical importance. For instance, by 
drilling any man of average intelligence in the 
necessary rules and principles, it is entirely 
possible to make of him a tolerable mathema- 
tician, because when once he knows those rules 
and principles he has done what is essential. 
In like manner you can, by your mere teach- 
ing, make a sort of linguist of him, or a gram- 
marian, or a bibliographer; but you cannot, 
on the other hand, by any possible amount of 
formal precept or instruction or exhortation, 
endue him with sobriety or continence or pru- 
dence or practical wisdom. And why? Sim- 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 343 

ply because in all these things mere knowledge 
is not half enough ; but it may be, as it usually 
is, a thing entirely apart from practice. The 
knowledge that merely knows is a very differ- 
ent thing from the conviction that dominates 
and deters. One may to some extent be drawn 
from teaching, but the other can come from 
grim experience alone. Is it, indeed, through 
lack of knowledge that most men violate the 
laws of life ? Are those who drink themselves 
to death not perfectly aware of what they are 
about ? Are the gluttons and the dissolute 
supremely ignorant of what will ultimately 
happen to them ? Does not one hear men 
every day declare that such and such a thing 
is killing them, but that they cannot bring 
themselves to give it up ? And are not these 
things oftenest found among the very class 
that is made up of educated men and women? 

" Video meliora proboque, 
Deteriora sequor " 

is a confession that is at once both older and 
more modern than the time of Ovid, who first 
wrote it down. It might, indeed, quite truth- 
fully be made by every one who has fully and 
freely lived the life of the larger world. All 
human history is rich in illustrations of how 



344 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

wide the gulf is which divides mere knowledge 
from the will and purpose to apply it : Seneca 
heaping up a colossal fortune and sitting down 
before a table wrought of beaten gold to write 
a philosophic tract on the curse of avarice and 
the blessings of simplicity and poverty ; Thom- 
son, who never left his pillow before noon, 
lying in bed and composing enthusiastic lines 
on the delights of early rising ; and quite re- 
cently, that blend of saint and satyr, Paul 
Verlaine, reeling home from a long debauch 
in the foulest stews of Paris to set down with 
trembling hand an outburst filled with passion- 
ate adoration of the God of Purity. If only 
teaching could make human beings wise and 
good, the world would long ago have welcomed 
the millennium, for surely there has been no 
lack of teaching since the time when men first 
came to see the link that binds effect to cause. 
Through all the centuries the moralist has 
moralized, the philosopher has explained, the 
father has exhorted and advised, the mother 
has pleaded ; and the young have listened to 
it all, and then gone on their own way uncon- 
vinced. And through the centuries, also, the 
priests have taught, calling to their aid the 
arts of eloquence and the promises and threat- 
enings of religion, appealing to every motive 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 345 

that can sway the mind — now promising in 
words as sweet as honey the splendors of 
immortal life and endless happiness, and now 
blasting the imagination with fearful pictures 
lighted by the glaring fires of hell. Does any 
one suppose that what duty and affection and 
pity and hope and terror, backed up by strenu- 
ous eloquence and religious faith, have never 
yet accomplished, can be effected by the kind- 
ly talk of a sleek university professor in some 
intercalated college course ? What possible 
impression could be made in this way by even 
the very wisest and shrewdest and most emi- 
nent of teachers ? A group of young men with 
the hot blood of youth running riot in their 
veins, their hearts on fire with passion and 
stung by an oestrus-like desire to fathom for 
themselves the secrets of the unknown life 
that lies in all its strange, mysterious fascina- 
tion just beyond the college walls — how much 
will the teaching of another man's experience 
stand for in the minds of such as these ? Some 
mewling milksop here and there may possibly 
accept that teaching and remember it ; but 
mewling milksops do not count in the general 
scheme of life. And as to some of these pro- 
posed additions to the university curriculum, 
the humor of the proposition strikes one rather 



346 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

forcibly. When a young man is about to fall 
in love, can any one imagine him referring 
gravely to his note-books to see whether the 
conditions are exactly suitable, and whether 
the professorial formula applies? And one 
would like to ask whether it is contemplated 
to give a practical and convincing turn to the 
instruction, as is necessary even in far less im- 
portant subjects. Is the university to offer 
several electives in experimental courtship, 
and is there to be established a laboratory of 
love? 

No ; it is just as true to-day as it was true 
five thousand years ago, and as it will be true 
five thousand years from now, that the most 
vital and important facts of life cannot be 
taught by academic training, but must be 
learned by every human being for himself. It 
is a hard saying ; but it expresses nothing but 
the fact of human limitation — the limitation 
that serves as a line beyond which mankind 
can never go ; for if the experience of the past 
could be accumulated, and if the youth of to- 
day could be at once equipped with all the 
garnered wisdom of his ancestors, and if every 
generation could add to this its own experi- 
ence intact, the race of men would cease to 
be mere mortals, but would rise above the 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 347 

level of humanity and be as the immortal 
gods. 

The fact is, that so far from adding to the 
subjects now included in the university cur- 
riculum, we should, instead, diminish them. 
The present craze for making that curriculum 
a common dumping-ground for every possible 
variety of instruction is the most unfortunate 
of all the tendencies that are visible in educa- 
tional theory to-day. As we have imitated 
the Germans in so many things, it is a lasting 
pity that we have not seen fit to imitate them 
also in excluding the teaching of the purely 
mechanical arts from university instruction and 
in shutting them off into the polytechnicum, 
where they properly belong. When machine- 
shops and factories and all the paraphernalia 
of the applied sciences are imported into the 
academic shades, and when the perfume of 
the Attic violet is stifled by the stenches of 
the chemist's crucible, the true purpose of the 
university is forgotten, and its higher mis- 
sion is in a great measure sacrificed ; for 
then there can exist no longer a distinct and 
definite type of university- man. The civic 
value of the university in times now past 
was this : it gave to the community a very 
special class, not only highly trained, and 



348 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

trained in a broad and liberal way, but trained 
also according to one particular standard and 
with an absolute identity of training. This 
identity of training bound all university-men 
together by the strongest possible ties of sym- 
pathy and mutual understanding, so that they 
stood forth as a sort of Sacred Band, alike in 
private and in public life, exercising an influ- 
ence for serenity and sanity of thought whose 
value was inestimable and out of all proportion 
to the actual numbers of the ones who exer- 
cised it. From this class came the men who 
laid so firmly the foundations of the American 
Republic, and who worked out in a broad, far- 
seeing way the basal principles of our consti- 
tutional law and public polity; for of this class 
were Hamilton and Jefferson and Jay and Mad- 
ison and Webster and Calhoun and Adams. 
They all received the older college training, 
based not upon the bread-and-butter prin- 
ciple, but upon the nobler and far loftier con- 
ception of what the highest education means. 
But at the present time the curious belief that 
all subjects of study are in themselves equal- 
ly important is dragging into the sphere of 
university teaching anything and everything 
which the casual person may desire to know ; 
and worse than this, it is putting upon every 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 349 

grade of capacity and attainment the self-same 
stamp of approval. Yet those who argue for 
this equality of value in the subjects taught do 
not regard the products of such teaching as 
being equal. They do not rank a great fly- 
paper manufacturer with a great statesman, 
nor a great cheese-monger with a great lawyer 
or physician. But when we hear to-day that 
So-and-so is a university-man, one never knows 
by reason of that fact alone whether this per- 
son is in reality a gentleman and a scholar, 
or whether he is only a sublimated type of 
tinker. And now that this confusion has been 
thoroughly established, what intimate and uni- 
versal bond of sympathy can possibly exist 
among the scions of a university ? The uni- 
versity has, in fact, been swamped by the in- 
flux of the mob, and its inmates are them- 
selves becoming only an unconsidered fraction 
of that mob. In other words, the so-called 
"liberal " policy in university government has 
not raised mediocrity to the plane of scholar- 
ship, but has degraded scholarship to the plane 
of mediocrity. It has been in every sense a 
process of levelling down ; in no sense has it 
been a process of levelling up. This, then, is 
gradually blotting out the true value of the 
university as a factor in the nation's larger life. 



350 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

By throwing its doors wide open to every one 
and for every purpose, and by losing all percep- 
tion of its original design, its chief importance 
and its noblest influence are vanishing away — 
lost in the wellnigh universal reign of the com- 
monplace. 

Linked closely with many other very serious 
educational mistakes, and from many points 
of view by far the most profoundly serious of 
them all, is that curious fancy, which is almost 
universal among our people, that education 
in itself and for all human beings is a good 
and thoroughly desirable possession. So axi- 
omatic is this held to be that its principle has 
been incorporated into the constitutions of 
many of our States, and not only is education 
made free to all, but in most States it is made 
compulsory upon all. There is probably in 
our whole system to-day no principle so fun- 
damentally untrue as this, and there is cer- 
tainly none that is fraught with so much social 
and political peril for the future. For educa- 
tion means ambition, and ambition means dis- 
content. Now, discontent is in itself a divine 
thing. When it springs up in a strong creative 
intellect capable of translating it into actual 
achievement, it is the mother of all progress ; 
but when it germinates in a limited and feeble 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 351 

brain it is the mother of unhappiness alone. 
Yet the State decrees that all shall have some 
share of education— that is, some share of dis- 
content ; and as the vast majority of minds 
are limited and feeble, compulsory education 
means everywhere compulsory discontent. 
Could anything be more fatuous or more 
dangerous from a statesman's point of view ? 
The thoroughly pernicious fruits of such a 
policy are already visible. We see on every 
hand great masses of men stirred by a vague 
dissatisfaction with their lot, their brains 
addled and confused by doctrine that is only 
half the truth and vaguely understood, yet 
thoroughly adapted to make them ripe for 
the work of the agitator and the enemy of 
public order. We see the farms deserted by 
young men who flock to the already crowd- 
ed cities in the hope of ease and fortune, 
and by young women whose attainments fit 
them to be admirable dairy-maids, but who 
aspire to be artists and musicians. Such edu- 
cation as these possess can never qualify for 
any serious role ; it only makes for grievous 
disappointment and a final heart-break. Nor 
is there any moral safeguard in a limited de- 
gree of education. Quite the contrary. It 
only makes the naturally criminal person far 



352 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

more dangerous, con verting the potential sneak- 
thief into the actual forger and embezzler and 
the bar-room brawler into the anarchistic bomb- 
thrower. Statistics lately sent to Congress in 
a veto message show the fact that in our pris- 
ons the proportion of the fairly educated to 
the uneducated is far larger than among an 
equal number of ordinary citizens. And this 
is due to the ill-considered system which forces 
a half-education on all men, whether they will 
or no, thus breeding for the State some of its 
most difficult sociological problems. A sound- 
er policy would make the way to education 
easy, but not free to all. In minds that nature 
has adapted for development discontent will 
spontaneously arise, and these minds will of 
their own accord strive upward. Let these 
find education easy of attainment, since they 
are fitted for it ; but more than this no philo- 
sophical legislator to-day should advocate or 
desire. 

The summing up of the whole matter, then, 
is this: the outlook of our educational future 
is very far from bright. A mistaken notion of 
the use and value of education now prevails, 
which, in a sphere of elementary teaching, is 
preparing danger for society and for the State 
by looking far too strictly at mere theory and 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 353 

by ignoring fact ; while in the sphere of uni- 
versity training the only safeguard against these 
growing evils is being gradually swept away. 
To seek to stem the tide of tendency is to-day 
an idle task, and one can only wait and hope 
for a reaction and a very radical reversion to 
the sounder practice of the past. With the 
modern scientific modes of teaching, and with 
an apparatus far beyond what other centuries 
ever knew, the philosophic thinker can imagine 
a university ideal which may some day perhaps 
be brought to pass. But the key to it all is 
the true conception of what higher education 
really means. The university does not exist 
to train mere sordid toilers and to help them 
to make money. We do not need more bac- 
calaureate bagmen, more "hustlers," more ma- 
triculated mechanics, more polymathic plumb- 
ers. We have too many of them now. Its 
purpose should be something higher— to teach 
serenity of mind and loftiness of purpose, to 
make men see straight and think clearly, to 
endue them with a sense of proportion and a 
luminous philosophy of life — a thing impossi- 
ble to those who do not draw their inspiration 
from the thought, the history, and the beauty 
of the classic past. It should produce for the 
service of the State men such as those who in 
23 



354 DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 

the past made empires and created common- 
wealths — a small and highly-trained patriciate, 
a caste, an aristocracy, if you will. For every 
really great thing that has been accomplished 
in the history of man has been accomplished 
by an aristocracy. It may have called itself a 
sacerdotal aristocracy, or a military aristocracy, 
or an aristocracy based on birth and blood ; 
yet these distinctions were but superficial, for 
in reality it always meant one thing alone — the 
communityof interest and effort in those whose 
intellectual force and innate gift of government 
enabled them to dominate and control the des- 
tinies of States, driving in harness the hewers 
of wood and drawers of water, who constitute 
the vast majority of the human race, and whose 
happiness is greater and whose welfare is more 
thoroughly conserved when governed than 
when trying to govern. From the small, com- 
pact, and efficient body of free citizens who, 
amid the unfree and disfranchised, made up 
the aristocracies of Athens and of Sparta, and 
the patrician class in Rome down to the gen- 
tlemen of England, this has been always true, 
and not because of the ostensible reason of 
their domination, but because they gathered 
to themselves and made their own all that was 
best and strongest in the nation, opening the 



DOWNWARD DRIFT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 355 

way for genius wherever it was found and 
working out those great results that stand as 
monuments of human power. A caste, an aris- 
tocracy of intellect like this, might still be bred 
in our American universities would they but 
thrust out of their precincts the faddists and 
the utilitarians, exclude the factories and work- 
shops and all the polytechnic patchwork that 
make of the university curriculum to-day a 
thing of rags and tatters, and retain only the 
humanities and the liberal arts. Then they 
might once more give to the service of the 
nation men of high breeding and supreme at- 
tainments, who would rise above the level of 
the commonplace to establish justice and main- 
tain truth, to do great things in a large and 
splendid way, and to illustrate and to vindicate 
the majesty of man. 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 

There is something partly pathetic and 
partly exasperating in the reflection that the 
vast majority of mankind, on nearly every im- 
portant subject, get their facts and their opin- 
ions wholly at second hand. Close to the 
heart of each great problem, whether it be 
theological or political or scientific or philo- 
sophical, a few powerful and unwearied minds 
are always laboring and watching, forgetful of 
self, single-minded, devoted to one sublime 
ideal — the discovery of truth, cost what it may 
and point whither it will. They have no 
thought of gain, no love of popular applause, 
no motive save the scholar's motive, which 
is, at its highest, so pure and so disinterested 
as almost to deserve the name of sacred. 
Whatever knowledge men have gleaned as yet 
in each respective field is known to them, and 
they live in serene contentment, and die with 
a smile of happiness, if they can but feel that 
by their labor and self-denial the sum of hu- 



360 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

man knowledge has been perceptibly aug- 
mented, that through their effort a single ray 
of light has stolen out a little further into the 
dusk of the Unknown. They seek absolutely 
nothing for themselves, and what they learn 
is free to all who care to take it from them. 

There stands about these men a second 
class — shrewd, clever, quick- witted, and in- 
genious, having much of the scholar's knowl- 
edge and very little of the scholar's spirit, 
with eyes that are turned towards the world at 
large, which is, in fact, their oyster. Whatever 
stream of knowledge flows forth from the little 
sanctuary where the giants of learning smite 
the rocks of difficulty, these brilliant persons 
rapidly scoop it up into their own shallow ves- 
sels, and diluting it with the water of the first 
roadside puddle, run abroad throughout the 
world, selling the draught to any one who may 
seek to buy. To drop the figure, it is, in gen- 
eral, only the adapter, the popularizer, the 
actual dispenser, whom the world at large en- 
counters ; and it is, therefore, to him that the 
glory and the praise of the discovery are given. 
Take almost any field of science, using that 
term in its broadest sense, and ask the average 
man to tell you the great contemporary names 
suggested by it, and he will always give you 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 361 

the names of middlemen, of men who sit in 
the outer gates of learning and not within the 
penetralia. Hence it is (to take two obvious 
illustrations) that the multitude regard Mr. 
Edison as a great master of electrical experi- 
ment, and view Professor Max Miiller as chief 
among comparative philologists. 

It is in the sphere of religious and theologi- 
cal discussion that this curious and rather de- 
pressing phenomenon is most strikingly per- 
ceptible, because such topics have from time 
immemorial most vitally and continuously in- 
terested the greatest number of human be- 
ings. And here the story is the same. A few 
profoundly learned men, equipped with all the 
means of investigation known to this last and 
greatest of the centuries, are laboring in the 
difficult field of Biblical research, animated by 
no controversial ardor, heedless of fame, and 
seeking only in a reverent spirit to eliminate 
error and to know the entire truth as God has 
given men to see it. Theirs is the knowledge 
of text and times, of the subtlest linguistic 
coloring, of the nicest questions of evidence, of 
the testimony that comes from within, and of 
the corroboration or contradiction that exists 
in the perplexing records of external history. 
They work on, and under their hands the light 



362 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

appears to grow less dim. Of the problems 
before them, some seem to contain the possi- 
bility of a plain solution ; there is something 
at least that can be clearly learned. But they 
know that the last word has not yet been 
spoken, and that they have lifted only a little 
corner of the veil. The time has not arrived 
for any man to speak with full authority ; and 
they still work on. But all about them are 
flitting other and restless minds eager for some- 
thing new, impatient of delay, filled with the 
spirit of the intellectual charlatan and the sen- 
sation-monger; and these men snatch greedily 
at the scraps that fall from the sober table of 
the wise, and rush off to proclaim a new doc- 
trine and to dedicate some structure hastily 
reared upon a foundation that will not for one 
moment bear a serious strain. They write 
books and magazine articles, and even letters 
in the newspapers ; and they bask complacent- 
ly in the sunshine of popular amazement. 

Upon these there waits still another class — 
the shallow, superficial, fluent preachers who 
combine the flair of a trained reporter with 
the ambitions of a popular actor. They 
are filled with the modern notion that the 
teaching of religion — the most solemn and 
impressively awful responsibility that can rest 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 363 

upon a human being — is of value only in so 
far as it can be made amusing or exciting or 
picturesque. These are the men who put off 
the external marks of their calling, who dress 
like commercial travellers, who slap you on 
the back, assume an air of brisk joviality, 
preach bicycle sermons, organize sports and 
pastimes for their flock, and conceive the 
idea of " church smokers " as a means of grace. 
This sort of thing they speak of in their own 
jargon as " meeting men as men," " bringing 
religion down from the clouds," and "making 
it practical "; not seeing that their unseemly 
and grotesque impersonation is viewed by 
men of the world with something of that half- 
amused, half-pitying contempt with which one 
would behold a middle-aged school -mistress 
capering in a skirt-dance. The eternal themes 
of reverence and mercy, of justice and of judg- 
ment, are wholly absent from their clack, and 
they can tell you far more about duck-shooting 
and the gossip of the clubs. 

When, then, the middlemen of doctrine, the 
theological jerry-builders, send out some new 
report of what they say has been discovered 
by serious and scientific scholars, this half- 
explained and half-digested bit of knowledge 
is snapped up in a flash. It is, very likely. 



364 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

only part of a preliminary study, a tentative 
hypothesis, a theory broached as being one of 
several possible explanations ; or it may rep- 
resent only one stage of an investigation which 
is still in progress and of which the final results 
may wholly alter the actual significance of the 
earlier assumption. But all this makes no dif- 
ference to the clerical seeker after a sensation. 
He hastily reads an article or two in the maga- 
zines, runs over a popular book upon the sub- 
ject, gets a general notion of what it is all 
about, hits upon a few catchwords and effec- 
tive phrases, and then feels himself fully pre- 
pared to discuss the whole history of Biblical 
criticism from Thomas of Heraclea to Tischen- 
dorf and Gregory. This leads men, especial- 
ly newspaper-men, to describe him as " fully 
abreast of the times," or perhaps even as "an 
up-to-date divine." If the particular informa- 
tion that has filtered its way down to him is, 
on the face of it, a little subversive of pre- 
viously accepted notions, something with a 
flavor of heterodoxy about it, he is especially 
well pleased. Nothing delights a clergyman 
of this type more than to utter radical senti- 
ments and views that to many are perhaps a 
little shocking — especially when put, as he too 
often puts them, with a half- humorous treat- 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 365 

ment of a sacred theme, or a jocular version of 
some Biblical narrative. He knows that there 
is something peculiarly piquant in heterodoxy 
when it is preached from an orthodox pulpit, 
though the same utterances would fall abso- 
lutely flat and unnoticed if proclaimed by one 
without the pale. Therefore he smugly keeps 
a tight hold upon the temporalities of his 
charge while playing all the time with heresy; 
and if he can only get some one to accuse him 
of being an actual heretic, his future is assured; 
for then the newspapers will print abstracts of 
his sermons, and he will be known both far and 
wide as a " liberal " and " modern " man. 

Not all who set forth in their sermons what 
they think to be the truth established by the 
higher criticism are men of this cheap type. 
There are scores of conscientious teachers, 
who themselves are troubled by the assaults 
upon tradition, and who vaguely feel the spirit- 
ual danger that lurks in much that is put forth 
by those who claim to know the latest doctrine 
of the critics. Yet these men, from the very fact 
of their conscientiousness, hold that it would 
be quite dishonest to conceal the facts as they 
have come to understand them. So they load 
up their discourses with questions of textual 
and exegetical subtlety; speaking of the doubt- 



366 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

ful authorship of one or another of the sacred 
writings, of the chronological uncertainty of a 
record long regarded as inspired, of pseudony- 
mous epistles, of the early canon, of interpola- 
tions, and incorporated glosses. They do not 
see that the fundamental truths of Christian 
doctrine, its ethics and its true divinity, are 
not in the least affected by things like these. 
They forget that the obligation and the moral 
beauty of charity and chastity are not depend- 
ent upon one view or another of a chronologi- 
cal date ; that the Aramaic coloring of a proph- 
et's style cannot impair the eternal validity of 
justice ; that the double authorship of a Bibli- 
cal record does not lessen the inherent sanctity 
of^an honest, reverent, and blameless life ; that 
the peculiar significance of a particle askew has 
no bearing upon the need which all men feel of 
hope and consolation in their hours of sorrow. 
And, again, they do not see how, nevertheless, 
these paltry scraps of third -hand scepticism, 
when imparted to the multitude, do actually 
undermine and honeycomb the foundation of 
a faith upon which must ultimately rest those 
motives that alone lead men to strive for a bet- 
ter and a purer and a nobler life. What does 
the layman gather from a homily replete with 
all the jargon of a transcendental critic ? Noth- 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 367 

ing whatever beyond a vague impression that 
all the teaching learned by him at his mother's 
knee — the teaching that has kept alive within 
him all the better aspirations of his nature — 
is doubtful, obsolete, or even false. And then 
as time goes on he comes to think that right 
and wrong are nothing but conventionalities 
when all is so uncertain, that life's philosophy 
is only hedonism, that there is no changeless 
standard of morality, and that an enlightened 
selfishness is in reality the highest wisdom. 
It may be otherwise, he will tell you, but he 
doesn't know ; and when religious teachers are 
themselves in doubt, why should he acknowl- 
edge any personal responsibility? Thus the 
process of disintegration spreads, and thus the 
teachers of religion are themselves uncon- 
sciously converted into mere assistant infidels. 
And all the while, above and beyond these 
untrained babblers of a doctrine still chaotic 
and half-understood, the dispassionate, untir- 
ing students who are seated at the sources go 
on and on and on, discarding one by one their 
own first tentative hypotheses, proving the 
falsity of their own first radical assumptions, 
and quickly leaving far behind them their own 
crude generalizations, even while the superfi- 
cial pulpit orator is still endeavoring to master 



368 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

these and to promulgate them as being the 
ultimate and supreme expression of discovered 
truth. 

A truly monumental work by Professor 
Adolf Harnack, of which the first part not long 
ago appeared, suggests inevitably the train of 
thought that has been here outlined. Professor 
Harnack is himself unquestionably viewed by 
Biblical scholars as being the most eminent of 
all the students who are to-day investigating 
the history and the sources of early Christian 
literature. As a chronologist he has no supe- 
rior, and he is deeply read in all the existing 
records of the period that is his chosen field of 
scientific investigation. His elaborate Z^^^^w^v/- 
gcschichte, only lately translated into English, 
has been, since its first appearance in 1889, a 
standard work with investigators of every 
school of thought. He is not an orthodox 
theologian ; in fact, his name has in the past 
been many a time invoked for the discomfiture 
of the adherents of orthodox tradition. But 
he is a type of the scholar who is absolutely 
free from any trace of intellectual vanity, and 
his frankness and generosity and candor have 
won for him the respect and even the admira- 
tion of those who have most earnestly opposed 
his critical judgments. He is one of those rare 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 369 

spirits who feel it to be no shame, but rather 
a most honorable duty, to retract beliefs which 
further light has shown to be erroneous, and 
who with a single heart desire to establish 
nothing but the truth. 

The work referred to just above as having 
recently appeared contains a most minute and 
searching exposition of a part of his investiga- 
tions in the chronology of the first two centu- 
ries of the Christian era, and to these he has 
prefixed an Introduction written in a singularly 
luminous and forceful style, and summarizing 
the general conclusions to which his long and 
patient toil has led him. This lucid statement 
of the attitude of perhaps the greatest living 
scholar towards some of the most vexatious 
problems of New Testament criticism must 
necessarily arouse a very general interest ; and 
it may be very specially commended to the 
notice of those dabblers in theology whose 
minds still feel the influence of Baur and 
Strauss, and who regard a tincture of the Tu- 
bingen teaching as the mark of erudite and 
enlightened liberalism. 

For the benefit of the general reader, it may 
be useful to recall briefly the attitude assumed 
by those investigators who, with perfect hon- 
esty but with imperfect data, laid the foun- 
24 



370 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

datlons of the particular school which so 
grievously unsettled the minds of all who 
let themselves be dazzled by its learning 
and impressed by its audacity. Of these 
destructive critics, Ferdinand Christian Baur, 
" the Niebuhr of New Testament criticism," 
and one imbued with the Hegelian view of 
history, professed to see in the books of the 
New Testament evidence of a period of storm 
and stress in the early days, of a period when 
discordant passion rent the Church asunder 
and filled with bitterness and resentment the 
factions that contended over questions of ec- 
clesiastic polity. Closely following Baur came 
Strauss, as ingenious, brilliant, and profound 
as he, and more aggressively radical than De 
Wette, his other predecessor, whose methods, 
in fact, as applied by him to the study of the 
Old Testament, Strauss now directed upon the 
New. Under his dissolving touch the Gospels 
seemed to melt into mist and myth ; miracle, 
prophecy, faith itself, appeared to shrink to 
nothingness. His keen analysis seemed based 
upon irrefutable fact, and the charm of his 
style carried his teaching to minds that sel- 
dom note the varying phases of theological 
discussion. The influence of his Leben Jesii 
it would be difficult to overrate. Upon timor- 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 37l 

ous souls of the Robert Elsmere type the effect 
was overwhelming, while others who shrank 
from the bold logic of Strauss still received 
something of his scepticism through less po- 
lemical works, among which perhaps Renan's 
Histoire dcs Origincs may be regarded as most 
influential. Probably not many English and 
American theologians went all the length that 
Strauss would logically lead them ; but there 
is not a doubt that much which he professed 
to demonstrate found lodgment in the minds 
of many men, especially in those of teachers 
of religion. Many perhaps did not at once 
confess to being influenced by what they read; 
but it is certain that their former faith, their 
feeling of certainty, yielded gradually to the 
solvent of this German revelation, and that in 
time their attitude became and has remained 
the attitude of men who doubt. As Professor 
Harnack himself declares : 

"There was a time — in fact, the general public has 
not gone beyond it yet — when the oldest Christian 
literature, including the New Testament itself, was 
looked upon as but a tissue of deceptions and falsifi- 
cations. . . . There is still left ... an undefined 
sense of distrust, a method like that of a suspicious 
government which is always fastening itself on single 
points, and which attempts by means of them to at- 



372 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

tack conclusions that are clear and definite. . . . An 
effort is now made to trace all sorts of ' tendencies,' 
and to point out extensive interpolations; or else a 
scepticism is visible which places probability and im- 
probability on precisely the same level." 

Now it is to be presumed that both the 
Te7tdenakritik and the scepticism of which 
Professor Harnack is here speaking are far 
less universal in this country than in Ger- 
many ; yet they certainly exist, and they exist, 
too, in minds in which their presence is not 
generally suspected. But their existence un- 
doubtedly depends upon a strong feeling that 
they are in accordance with the matured and 
well-established opinions of the very ablest 
scholars. Our doubting Thomases, in fact, 
have not yet got beyond the era of Baur and 
Strauss ; and they imagine that the views of 
Baur and Strauss are still substantially the 
views that German critics hold to-day. They 
know, of course, that the work of investigation 
is still going on ; but they are absolutely un- 
aware that its trend is by no means the same 
as that which characterized the scholarship of 
the early sixties. Hence, it is extremely in- 
teresting, and to the majority even of Biblical 
students it must be almost startling, to come 
upon a frank, dispassionate statement of re- 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 373 

suits like those set forth in Professor Har- 
nack's Introduction. To feel their full signif- 
icance and weight, it should again be noted 
that this writer is everywhere acclaimed as 
being the very ablest and most conscientious of 
those scholars who approach the subject from 
the side ofpurely secular and scientific criticism. 
What, then, is the deliberate judgment of 
this eminent investigator with regard to the 
questions that have just been mentioned ? 
Coming to his task with a thorough disbelief 
in the accuracy of the Christian traditions, and 
standing even to-day without the pale of or- 
thodoxy, Professor Harnack states, neverthe- 
less, that the conclusions which he has reached 
are in all important points in harmony with 
these same traditions. The irresistible logic 
of chronology, the marshalling of an infinite 
array of significant facts, have led him with 
most admirable candor to set down this very 
remarkable confession : 

" The oldest literature of the Church in all import- 
ant points and in most of its details is, from the point 
of view of literary criticism, both genuine and worthy 
of reliance. In the whole New Testament there is in 
all probability only a single writing [the Second Epis- 
tle of Peter] that can be looked upon as pseudonymous 
in the strict sense of the word." 



374 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

He then goes on to say that, even of the 
uncanonical writings, those that are pseudony- 
mous are surprisingly few ; that in the case of 
one at least (the so-called Acta TJieclcs) its 
pseudonymity was recognized and condemned 
by the Church itself; that there are few writ- 
ings that are interpolated, and that the inter- 
polations themselves are mainly harmless. 

"The literary tradition of the Pre-Catholic Period 
is shown to be, as a whole, reliable." 

But these general statements, striking though 
they be, do not exhaust the list of Professor 
Harnack's remarkable admissions. Practically 
he accepts all of the Pauline Epistles as genuine, 
though the dates which he defends differ by a 
few years from those of the Church tradition. 
He gives a chronology of St. Paul's life, which 
removes the last doubt, based on external evi- 
dence, against the authenticity of these writ- 
ings. He points out the internal evidence 
which each of the Gospels affords as testimony 
to the genuineness of the others. He states 
without qualification that the letters of Igna- 
tius and of Polycarp are all authentic, and he 
admits with a generous frankness the inaccuracy 
of the view upon this subject which he himself 
would have defended ten years ago. Most im- 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 375 

pressive of all is his broad and immensely sig- 
nificant summing up, in which he boldly asserts 
that the whole drift of critical thought to- 
day is not destructive, but conservative (he 
calls it " reactionary"), and that he looks for a 
strengthening of this tendency in the imme- 
diate future. 

" The chronological succession in which tradition 
has placed the original documents of Christianity is, 
in all essential points, from the Epistles of Paul to the 
writings of Irenaeus, correct; and it forces the his- 
torian to disregard all theories whatever relating to 
these events, if they conflict with this succession." 

It is eminently desirable that these conclu- 
sions of so learned and dispassionate a scholar 
may soon be very widely known. They surely 
will correct the false assumption that a sneak- 
ing scepticism in religious teaching is in any 
sense a proof of erudition or of liberality of 
thought ; and they may possibly bring back 
to a more sober way of thinking those whose 
convictions have been unsettled by a mistaken 
adherence to mere critical authority. Then 
we may see, perhaps, far fewer "up-to-date 
divines" and more of those simple-mannered 
priests who do not study fashion in their faith 
and change it with each season of the year; 



376 QUOD MINIME RERIS 

but who live quietly among their flocks, shar- 
ing their sorrows and their joys, and teaching 
them, not the latest thing in dittography and 
haplography, but instead those homely virtues 
that can never age, and that in every century 
bind men together and make for unity and 
purity and untroubled peace. 

Yet vastly more important than the actual 
conclusions to which Professor Harnack has 
attained is the evidence which this volume 
gives us of how shifting and uncertain at the 
best is purely secular learning. What this 
great critic held as truth ten years ago he now 
repudiates as falsehood ; what his predecessors 
stated with dogmatic certainty, even the most 
radical of modern Biblical investigators have 
long ago rejected. It is an impressive lesson 
to every one who is tempted to yield up some 
portion of historic faith to the winds of secular 
authority, to be blown about with every fitful 
gust ; for, looking back over long periods of 
years, critics recant, their teaching perishes; 
and that which stands immutable and quite 
secure is the great tradition and the mighty 
system that perpetuate whatever is best and 
highest in human aspiration and belief. Mere 
scholarship grows obsolete and is discredited ; 
but the pages over which the scholar pores 



QUOD MINIME RERIS 377 

still lend to the troubled soul the consolation 
of inspired wisdom, while the splendid struct- 
ure that has been reared upon their teaching 
is the one and only thing that, amid the wreck 
of theory, the mist of casuistry, and the su- 
preme assault of intellectual pride, has never 
for a single moment yet been shaken. 



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